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NEWELL DWIGHT HILLIS 






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The Message of David Swing 
to His Generation 



By Newell Dwight Hillis 



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HENRY WARD BEECHER 
A Study of His Life and Influence 

LECTURES AND ORATIONS BY HENRY WARD 

BEECHER 

Collected by Newell Dwight Hillis 

THE MESSAGE OF DAVID SWING TO HIS GENER- 
ATION 
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by Newell Dwight Hillis 

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The Message of David Swing 
to His Generation 

Addresses and Papers 



With an 
Introductory Memorial Address by 

NEWELL DWIGHT HILLIS 




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Contents 





Memorial Address . 

By Newell Dwight Hillis 


9 




Addresses and Papers 
By David Swing 


31 




American 




I. 


Washington and Lincoln, I 


• 33 


II. 


Washington and Lincoln, II . 


5+ 


III. 


James A. Garfield . . 


. 72 


IV. 


Charles Sumner 


88 


V. 


Wendell Phillips . . . , 


107 


VI. 


Henry Ward Beecher 


124 


VII. 


Phillips Brooks 


»39 


VIII. 


Decoration Day 


159 


IX. 


The Duty of the Pulpit, in thi 
Hour of Social Unrest 


176 


X. 


Foreign 

A Roman Home 


199 


XI. 


Dante ...... 


232 


XII. 


Martin Luther . . . . 


260 


XIII. 


Victor Hugo 


278 




Index ...... 


294 



The Message of David Swing 



A Memorial Address 
By Newell Dwight Hillis 



A MEMORIAL ADDRESS^ 

By Newell Dwight Hillis 

ASSEMBLED again within these familiar 
walls, affection claims her rights and 
memory tells us that now years have passed 
away since he ^vho was at once our pastor, 
teacher, sage, and seer gave forth his final 
word before passing on forever. 

For twenty years and more the eager mul- 
titudes who loved him thronged and crowded 
here, where he informed of beauty, traced 
the rugged truth, gave men vision and divine 
uplift. And other multitudes there were, 
whose feet indeed have never trod these aisles, 
but who were wont to wait each week for his 
printed words, and when his message closed, 
they were as desert pilgrims who found the 
heavenly manna had ceased to faU, the great 
rock had ceased to flow in cooling streams. 
Unceasingly with pen and voice did he ply 
men with motives of culture and duty, seek- 

' Delivered October, 1895, in Central Church, Chi- 
cago, where Professor Swing was succeeded in pastorate 
by the speaker. 

9 



The Message of David Swing 

ing by light and darkness, by hope and love 
to make men patriots, Christians — the ver- 
itable sons of God. Oft did he rejoice in 
our good fortune ; full oft was he touched 
with our griefs ; a thousand times he pointed 
out for us the paths wherein lay the most of 
happiness and the most of peace ; and when 
at last his great friendly presence was with- 
drawn from our homes and streets we found 
ourselves looking with altered eyes upon an 
altered world. 

When the news of his death came, it was 
with us as with Phillips Brooks when he 
learned of the death of his friend Richard- 
son, the architect of Trinity Church. In 
that hour the great preacher turned to the 
window, and in silence gazed long into the 
open sky. " It is as if one should wake to 
find the mountain which one's window had 
always faced, and upon which one's eyes had 
always looked, suddenly and forever gone." 
And now though the first full year is past, 
the vanished feet still walk with us, the 
silenced voice still whispers in our dreams. 
Knitting our brows to the daily task, we 
have proved that death does exalt those who 
remain to weep ; that our sorrows must en- 
noble duties, not end them ; that our tombs 

10 



A Memorial Address 

and our tasks are entangled ; that the rich 
blossoms of the heart grow crimson, nour- 
ished by our graves. And so we are here 
to-day to keep a tryst with memory, to re- 
mind ourselves of what our friend was ; what 
were the forces and causes that made him 
so ; and by every motive of honom', to pledge 
ourselves anew to duty, to culture, to beauty, 
to God, to His divine and human Son who 
taught His servant how to " dip His sword," 
not in blood, but " in heaven." 

To-day in this presence we remember that 
the true measure of a city's civilization is the 
kind of man it reveres and loves. Dying, 
Lord Bacon said : " I leave my name and 
fame to foreign lands, and to my country- 
men when some time be past." It was to 
the shame of Florence that a century rolled 
by before her citizens were able to appreciate 
the exiled Dante, whose genius redeemed 
Florence out of meanness and obscurity. 
Ours is a world where the fathers kill the 
prophet to whose tomb the children throng 
in innumerable multitudes. But it is to the 
lasting praise of our city, and proves how 
high our society has risen in the scale of re- 
finement and character, that in his lifetime 
an eager hearing was given to this sage, who 
II 



The Message of David Swing 

spake of pure morals, whose theme was the 
folly of ignorance and vice, and the suprem- 
acy of truth and duty. 

We know that eloquence is partly in the 
orator's charm ; another part is the kindling 
response of the appreciative hearer. And 
that generation must have loved the higher 
life and been touched to the finer issues, that 
loved this man who was the most refined of 
American preachers, and whose sermons and 
essays have a certain grace and delicacy and 
sweet completeness that make them alto- 
gether unique. Always our loves tell us 
what we are, and foretell what our children 
are to be. Whenever Providence would 
order a forward movement of society. He 
raises up some giant who capitalizes the new 
spirit. Howard, Garrison, Lincoln com- 
pacted in themselves the diffused ideas of 
philanthropy, reform, liberty, and then flamed 
these ideas forth upon the common people. 
Looking to these heroic leaders, soon the 
multitude went up and took a place beside 
them. 

It seems, therefore, like a special token of 
divine favour that God sent us this man to 
capitalize before our people ideas of taste 
and beauty ; of patriotism, liberty and re- 

12 



A Memorial Address 

ligiou. For not our harbours crowded with 
ships, not our lakes fringed with forests, not 
our mines, our factories and our stores stuffed 
with treasure have been God's best gift to 
this people : God's best gift has been the gift 
of great men like Lincoln in statecraft ; like 
Grant in defense of country ; like Beecher 
and Brooks and Swing as teachers of religion. 
And to-day it is a source of joy and gratitude 
unspeakable, that here to this new, rude, 
bustling city Providence sent one who seems 
like some Plato lifted out of his Athenian 
groves, and set down in the midst of our 
booths and markets, to build for us a temple 
with pure Ionic lines : to light upon its altars 
the sacred Hebrew flame. 

Recognizing his masterful genius, our 
editors, authors, and people have come to 
rank David Swing with the great pulpiteers 
of our generation. Comparing mind with 
mind, we speak of Spurgeon as devotional, 
Beecher as philosophical, Brooks as inspi- 
rational, Swing as poetical. Seeking a sym- 
bol of the qualities of each, we say that 
Spurgeon was a speaking trumpet, Brooks 
was a flaming heart, Beecher was a quaking 
thunderbolt. Swing a singing harp. But 
when many attempts have been made to 
13 



The Message of David Swing 

search out the power of this poet-preacher, 
his secret still remains a mystery. Until we 
know why the rose is sweet, or the sunbeam 
light, or the babe divine, we cannot know 
why the seer is the best benefactor of hu- 
manity, 

George "William Curtis tells us that while 
the poet's power is less dramatic, less obvi- 
ous, imposing, and immediate than the power 
of the statesman, the warrior, and the in- 
ventor, yet his influence is as deep, strong 
and abiding. For while the soldier fights 
for his native land, the poet clothes that land 
with charm and fires the warrior's heart with 
energy invincible ; while the statesman or- 
ganizes liberty, the poet feeds the sacred 
fires ; while the inventor multiplies the con- 
veniences of life, the poet deepens the life- 
spring itself. To-day we may not fully un- 
derstand the power of our poet and seer, but 
w^e joyfully confess that he revealed to us 
our deeper convictions, filled us with fervour 
and aspiration, and, in an age of fret and 
fume, lifted us into the realm of tranquillity, 
through parable and poem teaching us w^here 
were the paths leading unto happiness and 
peace. 

When Macaulay was shown the vast clus- 
14 



A Memorial Address 

teriiig vine in Hampton Court, with a trunk 
like unto a tree, lie expressed a wish to be- 
hold the mother root in Spain from which 
this scion was cut. Similarly, we confess to 
an eager desire to trace the ancestral forces 
that united in this elect child of genius. No 
great man appears suddenly. Ancestral 
momentum explains unusual strength. The 
foot-hills slope upward towards the mountain- 
minded man. Each Emerson has back of 
him seven generations of scholars who seem 
the favourites of heaven. Back of Henry 
Ward Beecher was a father who was at once 
a moral hero and an intellectual giant, and a 
mother who shot the sturdy Beecher type 
through and through with rich, warm, glow- 
ing tones. Thus the students have traced 
our friend Swing's parentage back to the 
border-lines of Alsace and Lorraine. There 
we front the old German stock, — philo- 
sophical, scholarly, ponderous, yet mystical 
and a dreamer of dreams. And over against 
the German stands the Norman, with a cer- 
tain lightness and nimbleness of mind — 
graceful, imaginative, full of rollicking hu- 
mour — his speech all rippling with sunshine 
and his lips bubbling over with lyric song. 
And Providence ordained that all the best 
15 



The Message of David Swing 

qualities of these two types should converge 
and meet in this poet-preacher. As for the 
rest, aU is veiled. His genius is an unread 
riddle. 

When the explorer has traced the river 
Nile back to the initial lake he has still fallen 
short of the source of that mighty stream. 
Above him in the distant clouds are the 
secret invisible agencies out of which issue 
the summer's storms and the winter's snows 
that fill the springs and crowd the water on 
in massy flow. And the secret of greatness 
is partly ancestral, but chiefly divine. God 
breathes it. Its sources are in that holy of 
holies where dwell clouds and thick dark- 
ness. There God girded this man for his 
task, and sent him forth with faculties like 
the prophet's sword. 

Searching out the essential qualities of his 
sermons, an English author has said : " Other 
sermons are logical or instructive or inspir- 
ing, but Swing's always add that element of 
beauty that turns language into literature." 
Misunderstanding this aesthetic element, some 
men have been captious and critical. But 
with David Swing beauty was no mere 
mush of Eesthetics ; no mere love of decora- 
tion and ornament. Beauty with him was 
i6 



A Memorial Address 

not the frosting upon the cake ; nor veneer 
upon the world ; nor Horace's purple patch 
upon a humble garment. Beauty was ripe- 
ness, soundness, maturity. Ugliness spake 
of broken laws. He saw that the pink flush 
upon the cheek of the babe or maiden meant 
perfect health, and that the muddiness in the 
drunkard's eye was the sediment of sin. The 
soft flush upon the plum or purple cluster 
and the robe of loveliness cast o'er the yel- 
low harvest fields was God's way of saying 
that His work was done, that things had 
come to ripeness and touched the limit of 
their growth. 

He knew that when conversation was car- 
ried up unto beauty it became eloquence ; 
that knowledge carried up unto beauty be- 
came wisdom and refinement ; that hut- 
building carried up unto beauty became 
temple-rearing ; while the man who was just 
and gentle stood forth before his admiring 
vision with a moral beauty beyond that of 
an Apollo. Therefore he revolted from sin 
as from a form of ugliness and vulgarity. 
As Shakespeare passed by the vixen and 
scold to select an Imogen or Rosalind, as 
Titian preferred the noble soldier's face be- 
fore lago's, dimmed with passion and seamed 
17 



The Message of David Swing 

with sensuality, so with winning grace Swing 
placed his gentle emphasis upon whatsoever 
things were lovely, whatsoever things were 
pure, seeking to bring men unto that har- 
mony and symmetry that betray the beauty 
of God upon them. 

Here in this vast centre of greed and gain, 
where Mammon threatens to master men, 
where youth is charmed with the glitter of 
coin as birds with the glitter of snakes' eyes, 
where stores and the treasure in them, fac- 
tories and the wealth by them eclipse the 
hidden things of the soul, here he stood for 
twenty years urging that the beautiful is the 
useful, that life is more than meat, that 
earth is not a stable, its food not fodder, nor 
its children beasts, but that man is what he 
is at his best estate when he dwells in the 
realm of knowledge and hope and love. 
Only the next generation can tell how much 
he did to strengthen those sentiments that 
manifest themselves in libraries, museums, 
art-galleries, institutions of higher education. 
But it is for this generation to be grateful 
that God saw our city's need, and raised him 
up to be with others what Bacon calls an 
" architect of states." 

"We who love him know that another 



A Memorial Address 

striking characteristic was the seer-like qual- 
ity of his thinking. Many of his sermons 
were visions into which were gathered all our 
hopes and aspirations, all our ideals, with 
their sweet torment and discontent, with 
their certain triumph and victory. In these 
higher moods he saw things unseen, dreamed 
dreams, fought battles, and sometimes per- 
ceived afar off that glad day when the col- 
umns of society should encamp upon the 
heights and hang out signals of victory. 
Nothing proves the creative mind like this 
imaginative element. Beholding a tree, the 
strict pragmatist sees nothing but fire-wood. 
His unit of measurement is a tape-line, and 
he estimates its moral value in terms of heat 
and flame. He fears exceedingly when the 
seer declares that a tree's chief use is to tell 
of the goings of God among the branches ; 
that a tree sings hymns and is a hostelry of 
delight ; that a tree is a living creature, — its 
song perfume, its words fruit. But the tree 
presents these aspects, and the seer must tell 
what he sees. 

The imagination is a prophet. It is God's 

forerunner. It plants hard problems as 

seeds, rears these germs into trees, and from 

them gathers the ripe fruit. It wins victo- 

19 



The Message of David Swing 

ries before battles are fought. It works in 
many reahns. Without it civilization would 
be impossible. Working in things useful it 
enables Watt to organize his engine ; work- 
ing amid the beautiful, it fashions pictures 
and rears cathedrals ; working with ideas, it 
creates intellectual systems ; working in 
morals, it constructs ethical systems ; work- 
ing towards immortality, it bids cooling 
streams, fruitful trees, sweet sounds, all noble 
friends' lips, report themselves beyond the 
grave. For faith itself is but the imagina- 
tion allied with confidence that God is able 
to realize all our highest ideals. 

Without this seer-like element life would 
be utterly unendurable, and society would 
perish under sheer weight of drudgery. 
Each youthful Clay endures the privations 
of the corn field, each Garfield the pain and 
poverty of the canal path, because imagina- 
tion unveils the future and reveals a day 
when the youth shall build thrones, lead 
armies, organize laws. And each reformer 
endures as did the prisoner in the Castle of 
Chillon. When the little seed sprang up in 
his cell he saw the tiny plant swell into the 
stature of a tree ; tropical birds sang in its 
branches ; flowers grew over its roots ; chil- 

20 



A Memorial Address 

dren were grateful for its shade; storms 
moved towards it from the distant snow- 
capped mountains. Imagination enlarged 
that little plant until it became a forest, and 
widened the prisoner's cell into a universe. 
Without imagination no man can become a 
preacher, and this divine gift was David 
Swing's. By it he stripped off the hull of 
dogma and found the sweet kernel. With it 
he explained riddles. It helped him exalt 
life's commonplaces. Under its touch moral 
principles that were dead and uninviting be- 
came as dry roots, smitten in summer into 
fruit and beauty. This preeminent faculty 
in him turned his sermons into moral poems, 
pictures, gardens, landscapes. Therefore, 
also Dr. Barrows' words : " If that which is 
keyed to universal truth is not to be out- 
grown, why should not men and women 
read for generations the thoughts of David 
Swing ? " 

And you who heard him here know that 
he was a sublime optimist. He believed in 
the triumph of goodness. Pessimism seemed 
to him a vulgar form of atheism. He saw 
God abroad everywhere leavening society as 
yeast. Growth was the spirit of the ages 
and the genius of the universe. Looking 

21 



The Message of David Swing 

backward he saw all creation set forth upon 
an upward march. The stars revolved. The 
dead crust of the earth rose up into conscious 
life. The vegetable kingdom stood erect and 
drew near to the animal realm. " The very 
beasts felt something stirring in them, and 
journeyed upward. Man, too, as if he heard 
the music drowsily and afar off, joined the 
strange procession and moved upward also." 
Afar off he perceived the extinction of ig- 
norance and sin, and the triumph of good- 
ness. That he was not impatient of the slow- 
ness of social progress argues his greatness. 
Mr. Gladstone once said that the contentment 
of the people was largely their blindness to a 
better way ; that to-day's institutions are 
concessions made to ignorance and fear. 
When, therefore, we consider that the veil 
was lifted before this man's vision so that 
he saw a thousand wrongs that might be 
righted, a thousand abuses that might be 
wiped away, a thousand reforms that should 
to-day be achieved, we marvel at his patience, 
his buoyancy, his hopefulness, his optimism. 
But he stayed himself on God, with whom 
" a thousand years are but as one day." 

When he saw the church journeying for- 
ward in an ox-cart, he foretold the day when 

22 



A Memorial Address 

man's heart and conscience should move for- 
ward with the speed and comfort with 
which his body travels. "When he saw man 
dispirited with his own littleness, he whis- 
pered that eloquence and art came through 
great thoughts and themes ; that Christian- 
ity's vision made Dante ; that paradise made 
Milton ; that a madonna made Kaphael. 
And so he fed the hope that the greatness 
of Jesus Christ would repeat itself in each 
loving heart, even as the sun sets and re- 
peats its colours in the topaz and ruby. 
"When he saw men discouraged whose secret 
cry was "No man careth for my soul," who 
seemed like King Lear driven on in the 
night, with head white and uncovered before 
the storm, he pointed these discouraged ones 
to the golden clouds and the mountain peaks, 
and urged that above and beyond them was 
One whose footprints are on the hills, whose 
song is in the summer, whose bosom is love, 
whose face and presence will explain all our 
hard problems. 

And when at last he saw men standing 
about the open grave of falling statesman, 
dying woman, sleeping child, he whispered 
that for Lincoln, and Tennyson to continue 
beyond the grave is less wonderful than that 
21 



The Message of David Swing 

they should enter the cradle ; that the hero 
and the martyr and the beauteous mother 
are not journeying forward under the em- 
brace of divine laws towards a black hole in 
the ground, but towards a door that opens 
into heaven ; that a second life and a read- 
justment beyond is the only explanation of 
the death angel moving through our streets ; 
that the Divine Form standing in the shadow 
behind man, the divine laws girding man 
about, the divine river that sweeps man's 
spirit on, the divine affection for dear ones 
that strengthens as the body weakens, all 
these unite to feed the hope that beyond the 
grave there stand Divine Arms outstretched, 
waiting to receive man's soul. 

The world spake of William Pitt as " the 
Great Commoner," because he dealt in the 
universal truths of liberty, even as science 
deals with universal propositions about land 
and sea and sky. Thus, in the realm of 
morals, David Swing laid all his emphasis 
upon the common-sense principles that are 
related to men, not as Protestants or Catho- 
lics, but to men as the children of God. He 
caused Christianity to stand forth as a simple 
single shaft. He saw that when a cathedral 
was mingled with booths and shops and 
24 



A Memorial Address 

ruined cottages, the grandeur of the temple 
was injured by surroundings that have in 
them no greatness. He saw that a mountain 
surrounded by foot-hills for hundreds of 
miles was obscured by its very complexity. 
Recalling St. Peter's, he remembered that 
the architects were enemies, and that the 
artists quarrelled bitterly. But the temple 
grew in grandeur because the columns and 
arches cast off the quarrels of human life. 
Rising into the sky it absorbed the genius 
and love of each architect, but left his strife 
and his chips to perish below. 

He also knew that the human mind work- 
ing in the realm of theology had been simi- 
larly untrustworthy, oft maligning God, full 
oft bringing Christianity into contempt. 
Therefore he sought a simple religion. He 
confined himself to a common-sense statement 
of universal principles. He saw that God 
made iron, but not tools ; pigments, but not 
paintings ; forests, but not furniture ; reason 
and conscience, but not creeds and politics. 
But he saw also that thought determined 
deeds, and that right living comes out of 
sound thinking. And so instead of begin- 
ning at the realm where we know least, and 
working towards the known, he began with 
25 



The Message of David Swing 

the reahn where we know most, and worked 
towards the unknown. Therefore, spake he 
of man and his divine possibilities, his social 
duties, his civil obligations, the development 
of his reason, the training of his taste and 
imagination, the enrichment of affection, the 
culture of heart and conscience. Oft he 
gave the rambling vine a new support and 
pruned away the dead and leafless stalk. 
Many, misunderstanding this, shed bitter 
tears and filled the air with noise and strife. 
But he kept at his work, for he loved that 
vine as much as they, and pruned it that the 
multitudes might find beneath it their shade 
and shelter. He remembered that all the 
great ones of history stood forth in an 
" alluring atmosjDhere of genius, truth, and 
beauty." He knew that man could never 
worship a defective God. Therefore he 
sought to cause God, as interpreted by Jesus 
Christ, to rise before men in such a holy and 
alluring form that each heart would ask the 
world to join in its anthem. During his life 
he sometimes destroyed. But it was only 
destroying the flower that the fruit might 
swell, the bursting of the bark that the tree 
might grow. All his destroying was for the 
sake of saving. 

26 



A Memorial Address 

Our city's debt to him caunot be measured. 
Searching out tlie beginnings of our institu- 
tions, Bancroft says, " We can never disasso- 
ciate our national greatness and our religious 
teachers." Guizot said Luther made Ger- 
many. Choate believed that Calvin shaped 
the Swiss Republic. Macaulay found the 
springs of English literature in the King 
James version of the Bible. When Spurgeon 
died Mr. Gladstone was quoted as saying: 
" This dissenter did more for England than 
any statesman of his generation." The ex- 
planation is, all wealth and material great- 
ness begin in the mental and moral life of 
the people. Things are first thoughts. The 
doing that makes commerce begins with the 
thinking that makes scholars. Tools, rail- 
ways, cities, books, institutions are but the 
inner life, crystallizing into material form. 
Wake up man's taste, and he paints pictures ; 
wake up his reason, and he writes books ; 
wake up his justice, and he works reforms ; 
wake up his conscience, and he cleanses his 
city from abuses. The beginnings of na- 
tional greatness are not in things without, 
but in citizens made fertile and rich in re- 
source. 

Happy this city, that produced this man 
27 



The Message of David Swing 

and enjoyed his presence through this, the 
most plastic and strenuous period of its his- 
tory ! And happy seer ; to whom God has 
given so great opportunity ! Ah, David 
Swing, David Swing ! The memory of thy 
sweet reasonableness is upon us. Still is thy 
friendly presence here, like a gentle atmos- 
phere. Oft didst thou charm the fever from 
our brain, the fear and anxiety from our 
heart. Full oft thou didst release us from 
thrall and doubt, seeking ever to make us 
citizens of God's universe. Thy tireless in- 
dustry doth rebuke us, until, with the Athe- 
nian, we murmur : " The trophies of Miltiades 
will not let us sleep." Thy courage and thy 
hopefulness do still inspire us, for as the 
Scottish warriors in Spain flung the heart of 
the Bruce far into the hosts of the Saracens, 
and by bravery reclaimed it, so thou didst 
fling thy heart forward to " the feet of the 
Eternal," and in death found it again. Here 
and now we recall thy early struggles ; the 
harsh winds that did assail thy bark ; thy 
nights of study ; the eager youth crowding 
about you in that far-off college ; the multi- 
tudes that for years flowed in hither with 
goings like the sound of many waters ; the 
ideals thou didst have for this great city, for 
28 



A Memorial Address 

its libraries, its galleries, its museums, its 
homes, its people. To-day a sense of debt is 
upon us. For the great love we bear thee, 
we pledge ourselves anew to truth, toleration, 
and charity, to liberty and fidelity, to con- 
viction, to the poor, to the slave and the 
savage, to Jesus Christ thy Saviour, to God 
thy Father. May learning like thine abide 
ever in our libraries. May goodness like 
thine ever lend glory to all our chapels. 
May thy all-perceiving reason, thy all-judg- 
ing reason, hallow our council chambers. 
May eloquence lend glory to our forum and 
pulpit. May heaven drop thy charmed gifts 
upon our children and our children's children, 
until all are Christians and patriots. And 
we will give thee gratitude, and greet thee 
beyond. 



29 



The Message of David Swing 

Addresses and Papers 
American 



WASHINGTON AND LINCOLN, I 

IN this month of February come the birth- 
days of om' Nation's two greatest men. 
The twelfth and twenty-second days of this 
month will forever take this time of wintry 
deadness and hand it over to all the tropical 
luxuriance of a grateful and loving memory, 
and make it lie in the confines of perpetual 
spring. Flowers that winter denies these 
days, the Nation will supply from its heart. 
Great sky-watchers those two ! Such as 
Christ outlined. They illustrate the text ' 
and the whole character of the Man of 
Nazareth. As Jesus said : Do not suffer 
your thoughts and feelings to pause in the 
evening and morning colours of the horizon 
made by your little hills and fields and skies, 
but upon those spectacles of nature permit 
your souls to step upward until yoa shall 
mark what kind of a day ought to come or 

^ Matthew xvi. 3 : Ye can discei'n the face of the sky, 
but can ye not discern the signs of the times ? 

33 



The Message of David Swing 

is coming to the land which the Hebrews 
consecrated in their prayers and holy psalms, 
and which the Koman legions have brought 
to such desolation — so these two modern 
minds obey the Master, and rise up as illu- 
mined pictures of the old lesson. And the 
one standing in the valley of the Potomac, 
the other standing in the sea-like prairies far 
away, rested not in the scenes of nature as 
painted on forest and hill, grass and sky, but 
passing from these to the mightier scenery 
of man, his state, his church, his home, his 
library, they gave their minds and powers to 
a mighty work, and as though reading all 
the redness and w^onder and beauty of the 
sky, they said in perfect unison : To-day it 
will be stormy ; to-morrow it will be fair ! 

According to all the biographers of Jesus, 
He was a great admirer of the means granted 
to man for forming some acquaintance with 
his world. He thought the eye and ear 
Tvorth cultivating and using. If eluj man 
had eyes for a special purpose he ought to 
bring them into daily use. If any man had 
ears he ought to be continually listening, for 
the very fact of the eye and ear was a proof 
ample that there would always be around 
man something to be seen and heard. 
34 



Washington and Lincoln, I 

The Darwinians hold the theory that the 
first forms of animal life did not possess such 
senses as the eye and the ear ; that the ex- 
ternal world contamed so much light and so 
many things to be seen and contained so 
many things to be heard that these outside 
objects in their effort to get into the human 
brain wore away at last the coverings of the 
hidden intellect, and made such openings as 
those which admit scenes and sounds. Inas- 
much as matter preceded the mind, it was 
necessary for the evolutionists to find some 
method by which light could make an eye 
and sound make an ear. Thus a demand for 
an eye created the supply of nerves and 
lenses and eyelids. 

The religious mind assumes two notions : 
that a God made a wonderful world, and 
then that He gave man those senses which 
may enable him to sustain many relations to 
the great surrounding wonder. Happy man, 
that his eye can all lifelong sweep over such 
a horizon of land, water and sky, and that 
his ear can note myriads of tones from the 
deep sound of thunder to the song of a bird 
and the words of an orator or a friend ! So 
amazing are these two powers that persons 
have wondered whether, if they must part 
35 



The Message of David Swing 

witli one of them, they would rather be deaf 
or blind. In such an hour of indecision each 
sense seems of infinite worth. From these 
two forms of mental power came the old 
wonderment that there should be any person 
who having eyes should refuse to see their 
w^orld, and having ears should refuse to hear 
it. What is true of the eye is true of the 
whole mind and true of the heart. It must 
be thought singular that a creature should 
possess a mind without using it. Its use 
ought to be as natural as the drinking of 
water when man is thirsty, or the eating of 
food when he is hungry. 

It ought alone to follow that the rational 
being having eyes will try to see the most 
impressive spectacle, and having ears will 
attempt to hear the most interesting or 
thrilling sounds. Why gaze at a clod when 
by raising the eye you can see a rainbow or 
an ocean ? Why listen to a rattling, empty 
wagon when by passing into a capitol one 
might hear a Clay or a Webster ? Standing 
amid the endless prodigality of scenes and 
sounds man must be an eclectic. He must 
separate the great from the small, the melody 
from the discord. 

Christ illustrated His own proposition. He 
36 



Washington and Lincoln, I 

came into Judasa and at once saw it and 
heard it. He came into the great Roman 
Empire — that aggregate of a hnndred millions 
of souls, that vast bulk of Eastern and West- 
ern literature, politics, and religion — and in 
a few years He saw all and heard all. He 
saw the arrogance of things ; the degrada- 
tion of the people, the tears of women and 
children, the errors about God ; He heard all 
the uproar of the race, the din made out of 
the laughter of the wicked, and the groans 
of the oppressed. He seemed to say : Why 
should I stand here and not see the mighty 
vision and not hear the mingled discord and 
music ? 

The month of February always recalls 
two men who having eyes saw and having 
ears heard. They selected the greatest scenes 
and the sweetest music. They were to make 
a short visit and be gone. They wisely 
looked around them and listened for what 
was greatest in their day. They selected 
enough goodness and greatness to make 
their birthdays sacred to a great nation. 

When these two men were children they 

began to see and hear the truths and needs 

of their nation. It is not explanation enough 

to say that great ideas were already " in the 

37 



The Message of David Swing 

air." "We know that all great minds which 
had ever lived had spoken some word in be- 
half of equal rights and personal liberty. 
From Plato to Dante the eulogy of freedom 
had been perennial. That stream of truth 
had indeed been reduced by many a desert, 
but it had never gone dry. It was seen by 
Shakespeare and John Milton. It had be- 
come large in the times of Pitt and Burke. 
But few were the minds which could see 
clearly this noble truth of our race. The 
lightning had played upon the clouds for 
thousands of years before a Franklin came 
to look up with eye wide open. Antigone 
had seen her blind father sink down under a 
crash of thunder; Yirgil had seen the sky 
all ablaze with this rapid fire. Thus for ages 
had the thunder-storms flashed and roared 
over the nations. At last came one with a 
series of questions to be asked of the clouds 
and their dazzling light. It is not enough 
that freedom Avas in the air. We must love 
the men who caught the fugitive and gave 
it to a continent. 

When we think about such men as these 

two February names, we must dismiss the 

words " fate " and " destiny " and give them 

the credit of that choice which made them 

38 



Washington and Lincoln, I 

so great. They deliberately chose to see and 
hear their country. It is a sad universe if 
hell or heaven is assigned to man by blind 
fate. If the Emperor JSTero v^as on a moral 
level with St. John and St. Paul, then is our 
world a failure. Man is then without praise 
or blame. But if the mind can select a noble 
form of being and conduct, then the world 
becomes the arena of patriots and saints and 
is the vestibule of a possible paradise. 

In such a universe of a God and a divine 
choice society must run to the Washingtons 
and Lincolns, and throw at their feet the 
wreaths befitting their lives. This splen- 
dour is all their own. We cannot repair 
to the banks of the Potomac or to the wilds 
of Kentucky to take anything away. We 
must go thither only to thank the two mor- 
tals for seeing and hearing the passing cen- 
turies. These two men were at liberty to 
live worthless or injurious lives. Washing- 
ton was at liberty to become a Benedict 
Arnold; Mr. Lincoln was at liberty to be- 
come a slave-driver or a common idler. We 
must honour the two men for becoming the 
friends of their race. 

These two men, taken together, compose a 
most complete lesson of life. The latter 
39 



The Message of David Swing 

lesson came to supplement the defects of the 
former. Washington was the child of good 
fortune, Lincoln the child of adversity ; and 
yet they came to one greatness, as if to teach 
our generation that no wealth or poverty 
need separate the heart from great principles. 
AVashington had everything, Lincoln noth- 
ing. From these facts it is to be inferred 
that the good mind may move in its own 
name. If it cannot ride in a chariot it can 
go on foot. 

As wealth was measured a hundred years 
ago the young Washington was rich in 
money. He was surrounded by scholars. 
All those first families of Virginia loved a 
kind of moral and literary greatness. This 
high style was perhaps unported by Sir 
Walter Kaleigh himself who was a highly 
educated adventurer, anxious to be in perfect 
accord with the age of Queen Elizabeth. 
After Ealeigh, a large number of families 
brought to Virginia what might be called 
the intellectual style. In our day the old 
mental scene seems full of stiffness and 
pomposity, but by the time young Wash- 
ington came upon the stage the old vanity 
had reached nearer to the level of natural- 
ness ; yet could the picture be com^jared with 
40 



Washington and Lincoln, I 

the portrait of our day it would seem a group 
of wooden men and women moved by ma- 
chinery. All talked in a calm, rhetorical 
style. All table talk was carried on in the 
language of oratory. Love letters were 
composed in the measured sentences of the 
philosophers. The oldest brother of Wash- 
ington was sent to Oxford to be educated be- 
cause there was in the Colonies no school 
that was worthy of the presence and tuition 
fees of such a noble Virginian. After the 
return of this Lawrence, George, a mere lad, 
lived in the presence of an Oxford graduate, 
and must have absorbed a large quantity of 
the wisdom and culture of the best town of 
old England. Thus surrounded by mental 
and moral influence, George became quite a 
student of conduct, and when he was enter- 
ing upon the world of fashion and society at 
large he wrote out a set of rules which should 
regulate him in his trip through the multitude 
of men and women. His father, his mother, 
his brother, his uncles, his neighbours were 
all of one type and that type marked by 
morality, politeness and a certain colossal 
pride. 

Contrast with such a boyhood the early 
years of Abraham Lincoln. It would pain 
41 



The Message of David Swing 



* hearts should we attempt to recall all 
the particulars of that life in Kentucky, 
Indiana and Illinois. As if one would not 
suffice, that youth tasted the rudeness of 
three wild States. When the poverty of 
Kentucky became intolerable the family 
made a long, exhaustive journey to the pov- 
erty of Indiana ; and when the soul wearied 
of that bitterness the family loaded all things 
into an ox-wagon and moved through long 
and deep mud to find the extremest hardship 
of early Illinois. The moving Lincoln family 
recalls the verses of Isaac Watts about the 
sick man who in pain often turned over in 
his sick bed, but at each turn took his dis- 
ease over with him. 

Kecall the young Washington with his 
bright knee-buckles ; with his great Oxford 
brother by his side ; the air around them full 
of splendour, of culture and ambition : recall 
the young Lincoln following with bare feet 
a migrating ox-cart, which was simply rolling 
along from the deep mud of Indiana to the 
same kind of mud further West. 

The picture of Lincoln would be more 

tolerable if the poverty had attended the 

youth only in his minority, but it refused to 

leave the kind-hearted man and assailed him 

42 



Washington and Lincoln, I 

without mercy for abnost a half century. 
His day Avas darkened not only by poverty 
but by other clouds. 

Of that stay of fifty-seven years upon 
earth only the last ten were touched with 
any of the earth's kindness and beauty. It 
is no wonder Mr. Lincoln carried a sad face, 
for it is known that the face is shaped by 
the heart. As thorns and thistles do not 
produce great bunches of grapes, so long 
years of cloud cannot throw much sunshine 
on the cheek and forehead. The cruel murder 
of April 14, 1865, completed the long chain 
of grief. The clouds opened once and let 
fall a little sunshine upon the man's soul, 
but after those few beams came a swift dark- 
ness. In sorrow the last hour was in har- 
mony with the first. The tune of his spirit 
ended on the sad note with which it began. 
Of all great names in the modern roll-call 
that of Abraham Lincoln is fullest of pathos. 
Great but sorrowful, smiling through tears, 
he was murdered in his only day of a per- 
sonal blessedness. 

Our Nation ought to be glad that it con- 
tains these two forms of biography. Passing 
down the times together they sweep the 
whole field of American life and assure all 
43 



The Message of David Swing 

our youth that neither riches nor poverty 
must interfere with the race of the soul 
towards success. If our land possessed only 
the memory of the man from Illinois it 
might feel that no great man can ever come 
except by the way of bare feet and a maul- 
ing of rails. "With the daily spread and ad- 
vance of riches, hope of future great men 
might decline and fade. Our youth would 
seem too happy in poverty ever to become 
great in mind. What a poor world this 
would be if only those who are barefooted 
and bareheaded might "run along the paths 
of knowledge and fame ! And what a poor 
world it would be if those who are bare- 
footed were forbidden to walk or run in 
those flowery roads ! But what a good 
world it is, if it looks at only the faces of 
those who run and never cares whether the 
feet are unclad or are bright with slippers of 
pure gold ! 

The crowns of the mental empire are not 
in waiting for either riches or poverty. Plato 
was rich, Socrates poor, but philosophy could 
not see these distinctions ; she ran joyfully 
to both, Parrhasius dressed in purple and 
gold, Epictetus in the raiment of a slave ; 
but art and wisdom none the less ran to 
44 



Washington and Lincoln, I 

both these gifted people of the far past. To 
our age came Washington and Lincoln to 
teach our youth that greatness and useful- 
ness care nothing for wealth or poverty. 
They study only the face, the heart. If the 
eye sees, nature fills it with great scenes ; if 
the ear hears, nature fills it with melody. 

Aurelius was a Eoman Emperor, vEsop a 
beggar, but the sky did not care ; it con- 
ferred upon both the same immortality. The 
one essential thing is that the heart in youth 
shall cry out, " I see the world ; I hear it ! " 
These two American children met this de- 
mand, and from standpoints more than fifty 
years apart they read deeply the lesson 
spread before them by their country. The 
one looked and saw a foreign throne seeking 
to rule and subjugate the New "World and 
prevent the spread of freedom ; the other 
looked and saw slavery working its way 
westward, and threatening to make negro 
bondage the watchword of the Nation. 
These young eyes opened wide, never again 
to be closed until by the hand of death. 
Although the death-beds were separated by 
two generations, each patriot died amid the 
shouts of a new, triumphant liberty. The 
Nation on its memorial days looks back and 
45 



The Message of David Swing 

sees two young men rising up out of their 
tumultuous times. It forgets the abundant 
stores of the one, the wretched poverty of 
the other, and sees only the two faces, radi- 
ant with one intelligence and one love. 
Times and customs have undergone great 
changes since these two great Americans 
died. Wealth has come and political tumult 
has passed away. The peace and unity 
which the heroes made brought wealth to 
the people and took away that old struggle 
over liberty which had once made such a 
company of great men. Industry, inventions, 
great discoveries, land abundant and rich, 
combined to exalt all the little pleasures which 
money can purchase, and to conceal many a 
great form of mental service and destiny. 

The value of peace depends upon what 
comes after it. When peace is followed by 
the pursuit of money and pleasure then the 
biographer must find his great subjects in the 
days of war ; but when war is followed by 
public education and public wisdom, then 
the historian calls those years a golden age, 
and war is left far behind as the thunder- 
storm at night is left behind by the spark- 
ling morning whicli follows it in high June ! 
Our day is depending wholly upon that young 
46 



Washington and Lincoln, I 

generation which is now following the dead 
and which has the opportunity in full to 
transform iron into gold. "What avail the 
ox-teams which can break up the wild prairie 
unless men are to follow and sow good wheat 
and women are to follow and plant flowers ? 
After the grave of the "Washingtons new 
principles must be found. 'New eyes must 
see new happiness. The eye must again see 
its world. Its vision must not be clouded by 
either poverty or riches. If the young mind 
cannot see great visions the world will at 
last say to it : Alas that youth was born 
blind ! 

It is often lamented by the churchmen 
that "Washington and Lincoln possessed little 
religion except that found in the word 
" God." All that can here be affirmed is 
that what the religion of those tv/o men 
lacked in theological details it made up in 
greatness. Their minds were born with a 
love of great principles. Washington loved 
and exalted each great principle. He was 
compelled by his nature to select from Chris- 
tianity its central ideas. This tendency was 
intensified by the local friendship for France. 
France was battling against a vast bundle of 
false, Christian particulars. The Colonies so 
47 



The Message of David Swing 

hated England and so admired France that 
most of our early statesmen reduced Chris- 
tianity to that French rationalism which was 
quite well satisfied with the doctrine of a 
Creator. A superstitious Christianity was 
falling to pieces, and the new orthodoxy 
had not yet come. Many of these states- 
men, when they took any steps at all in the 
path of religion, walked with God alone. 

Mr. Lincoln also came seeking principles. 
His mind could see greatness at a glance. 
In the wilds of Kentucky and Indiana he 
had seen at revivals young men and young 
women preparing to shout. He had seen the 
deacons and elders removing the coat and 
extra clothing from the young man, and the 
mothers arranging some young girls that 
these converts might for an hour or two 
move the upper and lower worlds with their 
motions and shoutings. The present ration- 
alized, orthodox church had not come. It 
Avas not in sight. The Presbyterians saw 
many of their converts fall in a trance ; the 
Methodists shouted, and depended upon what 
they called " the power." There were no 
kind words for those rational minds which 
asked for a simple religion of worship and 
righteousness. The Church mistook reason 
48 



Washington and Lincoln, I 

for iufidelity and hostility. Mighty changes 
have come since those two graves were 
made. 

There are few instances in which a mind 
great enough to reach great principles in 
politics has been satisfied with a fanatical 
religion. The Cavour who emancipated 
Italy became broad in religion w^hen he be- 
came great in politics. The Castelar who fed 
out great truths to Spain reached the same 
greatness of faith. It must not be asked for 
Washinojton and Lincoln that having reached 
greatness in political principles they should 
have loved littleness in piety. It is probable 
that living in our day these two men would 
have found peace in that new Christianity 
which is passing along in so much of truth 
and beauty. l!^either of these eminent men 
possessed enough of poetry to have made 
him worship like a ISTewman or a St. J ohn ; 
but in our day their estimate of God would 
have passed as being an adequate faith for a 
statesman, Lincoln possessed something of 
the poetic sentiment, but what of this deli- 
cacy lay in either soul was trampled to death 
under the horses and chariots of war. "When 
Mars reaches out his bloody hand the Muses 
sit down and weep. The daughters of Zion 
49 



The Message of David Swing 

hang up their harps, and refuse to sing in a 
bloody land. 

February 12th will recall the most illus- 
trious name in history, but it will awaken 
thought in vain unless it shall induce the 
youth to march through the past into the 
present and through the present up to the 
future. Memory is most useful when it 
empties its riches into the urns of hope. The 
past must be the musician for the morrow. 
"Washington saw great principles and out of 
them he created the happiness of millions. 
The war did not create him, for he was 
selecting principles before war came. Be- 
fore the seven years of battle he had been 
extracting power from forty years of com- 
mon life. The clouds of war did not make 
his soul's rainbow, they only revealed it. 
Our eyes are so poor and weak that we 
cannot see the seven colours of the mind un- 
less there is a black cloud behind them. 
"Washington made his character out of the 
world's common sunshine ; he used it in the 
storm. 

Around the feet of this new generation 
lies to-day a world of mental and moral prin- 
ciples. The Church is coming upon them, 
the State is finding them like gold-dust 
50 



Washington and Lincoln, I 

hidden in the earth. As men in the classic 
lands are flinging aside dust and ashes, and 
are exhuming temples, statues, and jewels, 
so men of mind are passing below the dust 
of the centuries and are lifting up into the 
air and light truths of a divine beauty. So 
vast are these hidden stores of thought that 
we must conclude both politics and Chris- 
tianity to be only in the early morning of 
their career. 

But we have come to a new crisis. It is 
not to be inquired now what will the deepest 
poverty do? What salvation will the rail- 
splitter bring ? What genius will be born 
to us out of Kentucky dust ? We know the 
kindness of earth in this one direction. A 
more pensive inquiry is found in the wonder- 
ment what salvation and blessings the rich 
children are about to bring. Are their es- 
tates destined like those of young Washing- 
ton to turn into moral and intellectual splen- 
dour ? 

In high agriculture the fields must not al- 
ways grow one kind of grass or grain. The 
soul dies under such a tax upon one kind of 
its virtues. Thus society must renew its life 
and inspiration and when the fathers have 
amassed gold, the children should not slay 
51 



The Message of David Swing 

the rich land which produced the harvest 
but they should change the growing and 
make the next summer time blend with the 
fruits and grains of every art, every virtue, 
every hope. 

Under such magical changes the plains of 
humanity cannot become a desert ; like the 
valley of the Nile, they will become richer 
at each overflow of the advancing human 
race. 

The earth's possibilities are so great that 
it will tax the genius of both poverty and 
wealth to disclose them. Eminent women 
are lamenting that woman's world will seem 
so small in any world-wide display of works 
and talents. But how could it be infinite ? 
She was a powerless slave until yesterday. 
Over the gatew^ay of her temple she ought 
to write the words : " The Works of One 
Day of Liberty." But man has a long, long 
history, over most of which he ought to sit 
down and weep. He has for the most part 
chosen to see what was least glorious. It is 
to be hoped that he is penitential at least ; 
and that millions of youths are in mind 
and soul following those faces which, human 
in America and other lands and divine in 
Judiea, are looking up, and with the eye see- 
52 



Washington and Lincoln, I 

ing all the great spectacles of God and man, 
and with the ear hearing all the hymns of 
religion and all the great melodies and 
symphonies of human life. 



53 



n 

WASHINGTON AND LINCOLN, II 

WHILE our Nation grows older and 
adds to its moral worth as rapidly 
as to its passing years, its memorial days 
will become more significant, and no states- 
man or editor or clergyman will pass uncon- 
sciously such graves as those of "Washington 
and Lincoln. The Greeks and Latins cele- 
brated the death-days of their great men 
because greatness did not reach its climax 
at the cradle, but nearer the tomb. Our 
country, in regarding the birthdays of its 
distinguished sons, has in heart the same 
feelings which the classics cherished, and 
uses the joy and beauty of the cradle only 
as an emblem of the subsequent splendour 
of life. Any day taken from that career 
which ended in 1799 — such as the day in 
October when Cornwallis surrendered to 
Washington — would answer as well as the 
day in February for a trumpet-call to awaken 
an unequalled memory. Be the hour that 
54 



Washington and Lincoln, II 

of cradle or inauguration or farewell address 
or grave, it recalls the one great historic 
fact — the man. 

The American habit of taking up the 
birthday as an emblem of the whole page 
or volume in history is well, for there the 
first smile of life is seen and the cradle is 
less sad than the sepulchre. This smallest 
month in the year is ornamented by the two 
greatest birthdays recorded upon our con- 
tinent—those of Washington and Lincoln. 
February 12th will by degrees become the 
associate in love and memory of Febru- 
ary 22d, and both will advance in honour 
with the advance of public patriotism and 
culture. 

Only ten years lay between the death of 
Washington and the birth of Abraham Lin- 
coln. In that little interregnum the people 
ruled just as they do now when both kings 
have long been absent from the land they 
loved. But we should all see to it that the 
absence is only that of the material form, 
not that of the soul. The bookmaker, the 
journalist, the politician, the preacher, the 
poet, and the painter should carry onward 
the spirit of these men and make them to be 
the same moral forces in the morrow they 
55 



The Message of David Swing 

Avere in the yesterday. What the old saints 
are to Christianity these two patriots are 
to our country. Take from beneath our 
churches the Christ and the Saints Paul 
and John, and although each truth of a 
natural religion would remain, what a cold- 
ness would be felt in the walls ! How hearts 
would freeze at the altars ! So our Nation 
does not repose upon only abstract ideas, but 
also upon the warm hearts which once beat 
along the Potomac and in the prairies of 
Illinois. 

Society is moved, but also held by its 
attachments, and doubly fortunate and suc- 
cessful is it when its attachments bind it 
to the best truths. Men love their country, 
right or wrong ; but fortunate is our Nation 
in that its great heroic characters were in 
perfect harmony with the most refined light, 
and thus truth and sentiment are in full 
partnership. There have been states which 
have had to apologize for the defects of 
their heroes — their Caesars or Napoleons or 
Georges— their emperors or queens or czars ; 
but fortunate was this February in those 
two cradles over which attachment and phi- 
losophy join in unusual concord. Love sees 
nothing that need be forgiven. Patriotism 
56 



Washington and Lincoln, II 

and reason meet over these birthdaj^-s and, 
willing to love country, right and wrong, 
men may love it all the more in this unsullied 
memory of right. 

Next to the saints of religion must be 
ranked in all our minds these saints of our 
country; because our ISTation asks not for 
political theory only, but for a worship, a 
friendship that can conquer and hope like the 
faith of the Christians. When an enemy 
rises up against this Eepublic it must always 
find not a mere soulless corporation, but a 
passion, a sentiment which will pluck up trees 
by the root and toss mountains into the sea. 
A mother defends her child not only because 
of right and principle, but also because of 
her affection. Thus great, pure leaders, like 
those of historic memory, enlarge political 
philosophy into devotion. It helped our 
Nation in its dark days of 1776 and 1861 
that its two leaders were so worthy of ad- 
miration. The soldiers of Yalley Forge saw 
in their general a lofty character for whom 
they could endure privations, in whom they 
could trust. "When they were cold and 
hungry and homesick they were still in- 
spired by the merit of their commander. 
He had separated himself from his wealth 
57 



The Message of David Swing 

and its peace to be a soldier against the 
greatest power upon earth ; the troops saw of 
that moral worth and Avere cheered by the 
vision when all other scenes were darkened. 
When Baron Steuben, an ardent volunteer 
from the German army, saw the troops at 
Yalley Forge, their wants of all the com- 
forts of life, he wondered what held the 
soldiers so firmly to their post of duty. It 
was a moral power that held them — the 
hope of a free nation and faith in their 
chieftain. In Philadelphia the British army, 
from the highest to the humblest, was spend- 
ing in carousal the winter months which the 
colonial troops were spending in all forms 
of discomfort. One British officer kept a 
gambling house in which the common sol- 
diers were robbed of their gold. Thus was 
the British army a military machine, while 
an American army was a band of men, with 
a soul in it — an army of 6,000 friends of 
freedom and of "Washington. Washington's 
dining-room of logs, a banqueting hall that 
could be duplicated for fifty dollars, where 
there was simple food and no carousal, be- 
came an emblem of the kind of leader the 
rank and file vfas trusting and following. 
This scene was repeated in the war of seces^ 
58 



Washington and Lincoln, II 

sion. Whatever the hardships of the soldiers 
in that long and awful war, the troops could 
always think of Abraham Lincoln as being 
in full sympathy with them as knowing what 
labour and privation were, and as being will- 
ing to die, if need be, for the welfare of the 
country. The fame of other men arose and 
fell, but Mr. Lincoln's shone with a steady 
beam, however dark the night. All the 
simplicity and honesty of his character, the 
hardships of his early life, added to the im- 
pressiveness of his name. His history made 
him the basis of songs and of a deep admira- 
tion. 

It is wonderful that two such men, so simi- 
lar, so grand in intellect and morals, came to 
our Nation in its hour of greatest need. The 
need did not create them ; it simply found 
them. George Washington was just as hon- 
est and noble when he was twenty, and 
twenty years before the Independence, as he 
was in the Revolution. When discontent 
about rank and pay sprang up in the Indian 
war, Major Washington, then twenty-two, 
said he would as soon serve as a private as 
serve as an officer, and for small pay as for 
large pay ; that he would remain with his 
regiment on the Ohio under any possible ar- 
59 



The Message of David Swing 

rangement. Thus the subsequent Revolution 
did not make Washington ; it found him. 

Thus came Abraham Lincoln into our 
country, not created by the war of the re- 
bellion, but created previously in the mys- 
terious laboratory of nature. He was simple 
in life, clear in his views of right and duty, 
firm in his will, long before the flag of war 
was unfurled. Circumstances ought to have 
made a hero and patriot out of James Bu- 
chanan, but they were unequal to the large 
task ; they ought to have fashioned a leader 
out of Stephen A. Douglas, but they could 
not teach him the whole of the right as to 
Territories where no slave had ever been. 
Circumstances did not fit Wendell Phillips 
nor Mr. Garrison for the highest ofiice, for 
neither of them could have carried that heart 
of justice towards the South which the times 
required. Many men came near being 
worthy, but some valuable element seemed 
wanting until this singular character was led 
up out of the high grass of Illinois. He was 
a marvellous combination of intellectual 
power and of the sentiment of right. An 
English reporter who had come to this coun- 
try expressly to ridicule Mr. Lincoln for an 
English paper (the London Punch), after the 
60 



Washington and Lincoln, II 

President's martyrdom confessed his poor es- 
timate of the Western woodsman : 

" My shallow judgment I had learned to rue, 
Noting how to occasion's height he rose ; 
How this quaint wit made home-truth seem more true, 
How, iron-like, his temper grew by blows ; 

" How humble, yet how hopeful, he could be ; 
How, in good fortune and in all, the same ; 
Not bitter in success, nor boastful he, 
Thirsty for gold, nor feverish for fame. 

" He went about his work — such work as few 
Ever had laid on head and heart and hand — 
As one who knows, where there's a task to do, 
Man's honest will must heaven's good grace com- 
mand; 

" The words of mercy were upon his lips, 
Forgiveness in his heart and on his pen. 
When this vile murderer brought swift eclipse 
To thoughts of peace on earth, good will to men. 

" The Old World and the New, from sea to sea 
Utter one voice of sympathy and shame. 
Sore heart, so stopped when it at last beat high ! 
Sad life, cut short just as its triumph came ! " 

Great memory of our country, that in ten 
years after the death of Washington, this 
child was opening its eyes upon a continent 
that was to make him a part of its second 
great drama ! 

6i 



The Message of David Swing 

So far is our day from the time of Wash- 
ington, that many details have fallen out of 
the picture, and there remains the form with- 
out the life. To the new generation that 
man, once called the " Saviour of His Coun- 
try " and the " Father of His Country," has 
become as dead and cold as a marble statue 
of some ancient Greek or Roman. The calm 
forehead and noble face remain, but that hu- 
man nature — which still comes to us when 
the name of Lincoln is pronounced — has fallen 
a\vay from Washington. But this is not 
time's fault, it is the fault of the new genera- 
tion : for God has made the mind such that 
it can recall past years and fill itself with 
living pictures. Nature offers no reward to 
mental indolence. It hates an idler in any 
field. If the passion for property has injured 
all love of literature and if so far as literary 
taste remains it prefers a foolish novel to the 
greatest pages of history, certainly in such 
an age a few years will blot out scenes the 
most wonderful and events the most thrill- 
ing. The law of nature is that to the indus- 
trious mind pursuing the best paths, the past 
shall be made almost as vivid as the present. 
Not eighteen hundred years ago can destroy 
the picture of the living Jesus ; a hundred 
62 



Washington and Lincoln, II 

years cannot turn into dead rock the Fathers 
of the Nation. 

Man is the only animal to which nature 
has granted the power of seeing the past. 
The brute lives by the day; but each edu- 
cated soul carries hundreds of years in the 
heart. Thus life is endeared, and the youth 
of twenty may seem to be living in a day 
thirty centuries in length. But all this land- 
scape depends for its breadth and beauty 
upon the mind's activity. When one comes 
to the Mississippi one may see only a muddy 
stream, or he can behold that stream with 
De Soto at its mouth and red men on its 
banks three hundred years ago ; and when 
the same heart comes to the Potomac it may 
see only the fishing-boys and the negroes 
idle in the sun, or it may see Washington 
there in those days whose sun went down a 
hundred years before the sun of this sacred 
morning came. Man's present is only an 
hour or two, but when his mind is awakened 
the past and future are melted into the pres- 
ent and make each passing hour great in all 
its associations and hopes. 

Not all minds may indeed possess the same 
power of recalling the past, but the common 
mental attributes are quite uniformly distrib- 
63 



The Message of David Swing 

uted, and few are the young persons of to- 
day who could not, if so they wished, recall 
the bygone times until they could hear the 
leaves rustle, in the autumn, under the foot 
of George Washington, could hear the axe of 
young Lincoln sounding afar in the lonely 
Avoods, could even see Jesus of ll^azareth in 
His cottage in the Galilean hills or in the 
streets of Jerusalem. God made the soul too 
great to lie poised upon the present moment. 
It should rest upon the past and the future. 
But if the mind possesses no activity, or if 
its activity is exhausted upon transient and 
worthless literature, the past falls out of life 
and all the grand ones from the Divine Christ 
to the human Washington and Lincoln are 
only names without any meaning. Often are 
they made the subjects of ridicule or wit by 
hearts that have never measured the great- 
ness of the lives for which the names stand. 
The philosophy of that revival of interest in 
the birthdays of our two greatest men is the 
hope that the new generation may grasp the 
past of the Nation and may pass from igno- 
rance to knowledge and from silly ridicule to 
deep admiration. 

One of the best lessons to be read from these 
two names is the warmth of their hearts. 
64 



Washington and Lincoln, II 

There was no indifference in these two char- 
acters. Great as their minds were, they were 
also powerful in their affections. Washington 
suffers now from the peculiar dignity of the 
old literary style. That style, perfected by 
Addison and Johnson, made a letter from 
friend to friend as pompous as a President's 
message or a King's address to a Parliament. 
Hamilton, George Washington, and Martha, 
each man and woman, used the style of 
Edmund Burke ; and a love-letter read like 
an oration. But translating Washington's 
letters into the simple English of to-day, he 
is seen at once to have been a man of deep 
love, with his country one of the chief objects 
of his passion. The kindness and pathos of 
Mr. Lincoln are better seen because they 
are expressed in the dialect of our time, 
while the same qualities in Washington are 
toned down by the stateliness of the Mil- 
tonian English. When Washington had 
bidden good-bye to Lafayette he followed 
the noble French patriot with a letter 
which shows the tenderness of the Amer- 
ican's heart : 

" In the moment of our separation, upon 
the road as we travelled and every hour since, 
I have felt all the love, respect and attach- 
65 



The Message of David Swing 

meut for you with which length of years 
close connection, and your merits have in- 
spired me. I often asked myself as our car- 
riages separated whether that was the last 
sight I should ever have of you. My fears 
answered yes. I called to mind the days of 
my youth, that they had long fled to return 
no more ; that I was now descending the hill 
I had been fifty-two years in climbing, and 
that although I was blessed with a good 
constitution I was of a short-lived family and 
might soon expect to be entombed in the 
mansion of my fathers. These thoughts 
darkened the shades and gave a gloom to the 
picture and consequently to my prospect of 
seeing you again." Strip this letter of its 
stateliness and it recalls a tearful carriage 
ride from Mt. Yernon to Annapolis. Wash- 
ington and Lafayette journeying towards the 
harbour whence the great friend of freedom 
was to sail for France, riding along mile after 
mile, in the Indian summer of Maryland, 
make a picture which is easily filled with all 
the friendship and nobleness and pathos of the 
once real life. It does not ask for much 
imagination to bring that good-bye ride so 
near and real as to make the rattle of the 
carriages audible and the slow procession 
66 



Washington and Lincoln, II 

visible on a long hillside, and thus visible are 
the travellers. 

It is of fresh memory that Mr. Lincoln 
was a man of unusual warmth of heart — a 
twofold reminder in these two names that 
our age asks for men not of vast wealth and 
of endless political acuteness but men who 
can love the country and be once more as a 
father full of affection for all the household. 
Men without affection for their nation make 
citizens like Benedict Arnold, Aaron Burr, or 
the advocates of Anarchy or political frauds. 
The country needs only those children who 
are capable of studying the great pages of 
history and of forming tender attachments for 
all that is good in our national career. It is 
the evil of our day that the human heart has 
passed out of power, and that machine 
natures have attempted to fill up the tremen- 
dous vacancy. The Treasury at Washington 
is full but the Kation's heart is empty. The 
rights of the negro are not secured to him ; 
the tremendous frauds of corporations are 
permitted to go on with a growing robbery 
of the people, and all because the love of the 
whole country is inactive and men of great 
brain have displaced the men of large soul. 
This disease of the political heart is so in- 
67 



The Message of David Swing 

fectious that we all are touched with its 
blight, and look upon our country as only a 
soulless corporation. 

But our government is not a corporation. 
It is a vast family of dependent ones where 
hearts and hands should be joined for mutual 
welfare. "Washington and Lincoln being ab- 
sent, the Congress and the President stand in 
loco parentis, and should carry onward all 
that old sympathy with the people which 
made all the old glory of our fathers. A 
colonial officer once wrote to Washington, 
suggesting that, in case independence was 
secured, they establish an American king ; 
that the people could never rule. "Washing- 
ton quickly wrote to the young aristocrat 
never to speak or even think of such a re- 
sult again — that the coming government 
must be that of the people. Thus was he 
the people's friend, and now that these 
States are occupied by fifty millions of 
people, the need of a friend has not under- 
gone any decline. These millions are not 
rich nor powerful, they need a government 
Avhich can secure to them " life, liberty and 
the pursuit of happiness." 

That our country is not a cold corporation 
may be read from the peculiar concomitants 
68 



Washington and Lincoln, II 

in its progress. Our national h3aiins betray 
a national soul. Had the old East India 
Company any hymns ? Has any coi'pora- 
tion in our land any great dead, any heroic 
graves, where students and benefactors stand 
to ponder and admire ? Have these corpora- 
tions any eloquence like that of Patrick 
Henry, Henry Clay, Daniel Webster, and 
of Lincoln at Gettysburg ? Have they any 
self-denial like that of the soldiers who fell 
at Yorktown or in the Wilderness ? Have 
they any poetry like "The Star-Spangled 
Banner " ? Have they any torn and powder- 
stained battle-flags? Hear these words, a 
part of a vast hymn : 

" Oft o'er the seaman's or the soldier's bier 
Droops the dear banner for his glittering pall, 
Where every star might seem an angel's tear, 
And every stripe Christ's mercy covering all. 

*' See from the rampart hov7 the freshening breeze 
Flings out that flag of splendour, where the Night 
Mingles vrith flaming Day its blazonries. 
And spreads its wavy azure, star-bedight." 

Did ever the noblest corporation — the 

London Bank — did the meanest in the world 

ever fly such a holy banner, and compose 

such words of eulogy ? Ah, no ! Our 

69 



The Message of David Swing 

country is not a corporation ; it is a senti- 
ment also, like that which binds the inmates 
of a home all into one love through life and 
death. 

Washington and Lincoln should stand as 
proofs forever that our J^ation is a great 
beating heart, capable of many sorrows and 
a many-coloured happiness ; a great heart 
like that of Jesus, which must embrace mil- 
lions in its measureless affections, and love 
all equally. All the struggles and disap- 
pointments and labours of "Washington, all 
the similar pains and tears of Lincoln tell 
us that when we come to the words " our 
country " we have come to a living soul, 
that ought to be as omnipotent as the hand 
of God, as loving and pure as the heart of 
Jesus, the Son of God and of all humanity. 

Washington came up from Virginia, 
Lincoln down from Illinois ; both came in 
one spotless honour, in one self-denial, in 
one patience and labour, in one love of man : 
both came in the name of one simple Chris- 
tianity ; both breathing daily prayers to 
God, — thus came, as though to picture a 
time when Virginia and Illinois, all the 
South and all the N^orth, would be alike, 
— one in works, in love, in religion, and in 
70 



Washington and Lincoln, II 

all the details of national fame. If any of 
you young hearts have begun to forget your 
Nation and its heroes, you would better sit 
down by her rivers and remember your lost 
Zion, and weep as the old vision unveils 
itself, and then pray God to let your right 
hand forget its cunning rather than permit 
your soul to empty itself of your country. 



71 



Ill 

JAMES A. GAKFIELD' 

IN that part of our earth which was made 
memorable by the presence of Jesus many 
of the cities and towns were loca^ted upon 
the summit of a hill or mountain. The op- 
pressive temperature of the summer months, 
and military considerations, and also a sense 
of the beautiful led those who were about to 
found a village or a city to seek not always 
some river-bank or lake-shore, but some hill 
or crag or mountain. Nazareth, the town of 
Christ's early Ufe, was on a height, and on 
one side there was a fearful precipice down 
which the offended citizens threatened to 
throw Him who had rebuked their sins. 
The two mountains, Moriah and Sion, re- 
mind us that Jerusalem was seated upon 
lofty heights and was a grand spectacle to 
the traveller who was journeying thither in 
its palmy days. The Temple of Solomon, 

* President Garfield was shot by a disappointed office- 
seeker July 1 ; died September 19, 1881. 
72 



James A. Garfield 

the palaces of the king and his court, with 
the walls and watch-towers, made up an im- 
pressive scene to all coming along the valleys 
of Kedron and Hinnom, and fully justified 
the thought of Christ that " a city set on a 
hill cannot be hid." 

The domain of Christ was spiritual ; when 
He spoke of ma.terial things He had the 
spiritual qualities of our world in His mind. 
He wished that His disciples might possess 
virtues so great and so active that all society 
might behold and enjoy their righteousness 
and benevolence. The ages had been full of 
diminutive persons who lived only for self 
and for all small results — persons like to 
lighted candles placed under a bushel. It 
was time other forms of soul should appear, 
time for the world to have minds and hearts 
that should be as large and visible as cities 
upon mountains. Soon after the great Pales- 
tine Teacher had uttered His wish, and had 
given the nations a specimen of a soul too 
large and too lofty to be concealed, the 
dream began to find fulfillment in many of 
the departments of human life. Thought 
and sentiment began to be enlarged, history 
began to record greater actions and to re- 
ceive iato its storehouse greater biographies. 
73 



The Message of David Swing 

There came along in the living tide men 
whose heads rose above the multitude like 
the tall clilf which "midway leaves the 
storm." 

Our Nation mourns to-day the loss of one 
too lofty to be concealed. All the grades of 
society, looking up from the door of cottage 
or palace, see this outline of a scholar, a states- 
man, and soldier and president, and all mourn 
that the image is no longer to be seen in 
life, but only in death's pallor. The specta- 
cle is made unusual not only by the merit of 
the man who has died, but also by the savage 
cruelty of the wound that robbed this citizen 
of his existence. The eighty days of physical 
and mental suffering, of alternate hope and 
fear, days which reduced a powerful man to 
the powers of only an infant, add their awful 
part towards placing his name fully before 
the civilized portion of the world. Made 
conspicuous by his character and works, Mr. 
Garfield becomes conspicuous by his misfor- 
tune. Thus this figure stands as upon a hill, 
and it will require centuries full of men and 
of events to hide its colossal outline from the 
gaze of mankind. Man is drawn towards 
the pathetic. What touches his heart 
touches also his memory. Pity often makes 
74 



James A. Garfield 

np a large element in love. Had Mr. Gar- 
field died of disease or by the limitation of 
nature he would have been a large subject of 
stud}^, but millions will read his biography 
in coming years because it ends in the awful 
cloud of tragedy. What do we witness to- 
day, and what will those behold who shall 
in future times run over the black and white 
page in history, black with misfortune, white 
in virtue ? It must come to us as a peculiar 
fact that two of the greatest of American 
names are now made more sacred by the 
sadness of their deaths. As though the over- 
ruling Providence desired that the young 
men of this era and of future times should 
study deeply the lives of Garfield and 
Lincoln, their deaths were made tragic to 
allure the student towards their chapters in 
the annals of society. 

Looking at this man not easy to be hidden, 
we see the ability of our country to produce 
a high order of manhood. That liberty 
which in name has been the ideal condition 
of all ages here verifies all the old hopes and 
produces a symmetrical character strong on 
every side. "When a lad, although poor, this 
Garfield enjoyed the free play of all his in- 
tellectual and emotional faculties. He was 
75 



The Message of David Swing 

free to move towards books and profession 
and wisdom. All the gates to success would 
open to him as willingly as they had opened 
to a Webster or a Clay. He was not im- 
prisoned by birth nor by caste. The path to 
law or to statesmanship was as free to him as 
the path along the canal, and out of this free- 
dom of a continent came an ambition of 
great power. Often when distinguished vis- 
itors appear in London they are given the 
freedom of the city in a gold box — an ele- 
gant letter before which the doors of galler- 
ies and libraries and parliaments and cathe- 
drals fly open. To this youth, poor and un- 
known, the nation gave the freedom of the 
whole circle of human acquisition, from the 
study of Greek to a place in the army, from 
the hall of the lawmaker to the chair of a 
president ; and his ambition and energy were 
inspired by the generous offer. Freedom 
does not confer merit, but it affords an op- 
portunity, and even allures the heart along 
by its possible rewards. It creates a land- 
scape which charms the eye of each one set- 
ting out upon the journey of life. Despot- 
ism offers a desert to all the humble of birth ; 
if poor and of low parentage the mind sees 
only an arid plain without tree or blossom : 
76 



James A. Garfield 

but the liberty and equality of this land 
make it optional with the traveller whether 
the plain, he is to pass over shall be a desert 
or a magnificent garden. All is left to per- 
sonal taste and industry and will. And this 
taste and industry and personal power are 
developed by the many and great rewards 
offered to their growth. Mr. Garfield is one 
more witness in this great spiritual trial, 
and his testimony is direct that the liberty 
of America is the greatest opportunity ever 
offered to man as man. Elsewhere rewards 
are offered to the few, here all are invited to 
the best feast of earth. 

In this eminent man the youth of to-day 
may learn that early poverty and hardships 
instead of breaking the heart need only sober 
the judgment and compel that common sense 
to come early and richly which to the chil- 
dren of luxury comes scantily and comes late, 
if ever it finds a dawn. We can now look 
back and perceive that the hardships in the 
youth of him who died as a president was 
only a condition of things which made all 
the philosophy which came to the young 
man assume a practical form. It was not 
thought a philosophy unless it held in its so- 
lution much of human happiness, for when a 
17 



The Message of David Swing 

toiler along a canal meditates it will be for 
the welfare of man, just as when a slave 
thinks, he thinks of liberty, just as when a 
fever-patient dreams his dream is about cold 
water. It has been stated recently that the 
dreams and laws of reform and all welfare 
do not come down from the rich and great 
but up from the poor. Therefore those 
statesmen who have tasted some of the bitter 
things of the world know best how badly 
the waters need sweetening. 

This patient toiler wrought out an economy 
for the millions of youth here and every- 
where. He showed what will and industry 
and exalted purposes can accomplish in this 
wide land — that all the young need ask 
as an endowment is mental and physical 
health. That is the essential capital upon 
which to base a large business in things 
either mental or spiritual. Out of energy 
and taste comes the real dignity of man. 
This dead president carries us back to the 
theory of old Plato, that motion or energy 
lies at the origin of the universe, that the 
starry skies and the variegated earth are only 
expressions of the self-moved mind. To this 
notion this one heart brings us back, for out 
of its self -moved depths there issued a moral 
78 



James A. Garfield 

world of great attractiveness. Education, 
learning, religion, politics, duty, honour and 
high office emerged from the mind which 
began its career far down in weakness. 
That force made all the humble days and 
years to be the rich veins of the later silver 
and gold. As in the theology of nature we 
gather up the infinite phenomena of land 
and sea and sky and say the One mind made 
all these wonderful and beautiful thing's, so 
in reading this biography whose last page 
has just been written in tears, the reader 
will say, Behold what goodness and great- 
ness have moved out of that one heart in 
royal pageantry ! 

"Was James A. Garfield great ? Ask those 
early years, when adverse winds always as- 
sailed his bark ; ask the nights of study ; ask 
the schools where he taught ; ask the place 
where he worshipped ; ask the halls where 
he helped enact wise laws ; ask the battle- 
fields where he led soldiers; ask the mag- 
nificent Capitol where he was crowned as 
republicans crown their chieftains ; ask the 
cottage where he died. If out of the answers 
to these questions there comes not the wit- 
ness of greatness the human heart must 
henceforth toil and long in vain ; earth has 
79 



The Message of David Swing 

no greatness. And yet all this human excel- 
lence grew up out of our national resources 
as though to show the world the peculiar 
richness of the soil. And grew inland so far 
that we cannot say that England or Europe 
combined with America to cause this char- 
acter. The boy and man lived in the heart 
of the continent all surrounded by his 
country ; and he lies in his coffin to-day 
a dead child of his nation. The country 
mourns to-day not only because a man has 
died, and died unjustly, and painfully, but 
also because that man was her son. She 
had reared him, she saw her own likeness 
in his face, she loved him ; in him were a 
mother's hopes. This land herein shows not 
only the power of its institutions to fashion 
a noble character, but that power of appre- 
ciation and grief that can weep for one thus 
overtaken by death. 

In the scene of these few days we must 
mark some signs of a higher civilization and 
a more sensitive brotherhood. Looking at 
the assassin we might despair of the present 
and the future. "We might wonder what is 
the value of schoolhouse and church and 
literature and freedom and the eloquence 
over human rights if out of these beautiful 
80 



James A. Garfield 

things there can stalk a man much more 
cruel than a brute. But while the heart 
wonders and sinks over the name of that 
one savage it is cheered by seeing a whole 
civilized race moved by a divine pity. One 
vile human creature wished to remove Gar- 
field from life, but millions upon millions 
wished him to live, live happily and live 
long. Men of wealth and men of poverty, 
men of learning and men of scanty educa- 
tion, men of all the political parties, men in 
the South and men in the North, and the 
crowned kings and queens loved the life of 
this one man and would by their esteem 
have carried him beyond the common three- 
score years of pilgrimage. His death was 
desired by the lowest one of the human 
race ; it is lamented by the entire population 
of two continents. If we count or measure 
these tears, if we see the Queen of England 
ordering her court to put on the emblems 
of mourning, we cannot but conclude that 
the hate of the one assassin is sublimely out- 
weighed by the esteem of the world. In 
presence of such an uprising of brotherly 
esteem the murderer finds his proper depth 
of infamy. In the light of a universal love 
we see the dark cruelty of the crime. 
8i 



The Message of David Swing 

But we must not forget that we have as- 
sembled to-day in the name of the weekly 
service of God. If in this life of a president 
any quality of Christianity is placed upon a 
mountain top that quality cannot remain 
hidden. In our times when there is threat- 
ened an eclipse of faith all religious minds 
must be happy to recognize the public man 
who in his best manhood saw the power of 
a belief in God, He realized the perfect 
grandeur of the words "The Lord reigns." 
He uttered thera in an hour of great national 
darkness, and the populace needed no other 
eloquence ; and when in July last the one who 
had offered consolation in calamity needed 
some refuge for himself he said he was ready 
to die or to live. Not the details of any church 
faith came, but the great ideas of the Christian 
religion grouped themselves around his bed — 
the best angels of those sad nights, for they 
were to help him when the skill of man 
should fail. 

It would be unjust to the name of Christ 
to say that Mr. Garfield's religion was only 
that of nature, only such general thoughts 
as were cherished by Greek and Eoman 
pagans. His faith came to him through the 
church of the age as it communicates its 
82 



James A. Garfield 

ideas through pulpit and press and the Tes- 
tament, as it is wont to surround and teach 
the young all through the days of formation, 
of passion and temptation. That church en- 
compassed this youth with its hymns and 
morals and trust and hope, and if at last the 
world saw evidences of that honour so con- 
spicuous in the Sermon on the Mount and 
that belief in heaven so visible in Jesus 
Christ it is under some obligation to confess 
that Christianity helped form that character 
which to-day all admire and lament. Beyond 
doubt daily association with learned men of 
all the different religious sects, and the daily 
discovery that many creeds made only one 
kind of religious manhood, turned Mr, Gar- 
field away from the distinctive doctrines of 
a denomination and led him into the concord 
of faith rather than into its discord ; but in 
estimating the greatness of his character we 
must declare that his moral symmetry was 
Christlike, and Christlike his repose in the 
hope of a second life. From his official and 
personal height he reminds the whole land 
that there should be church doors open to 
all the youth, inviting them away from the 
sins of the street and from the freezing touch 
of a godless air ; there should be a Sunday 
83 



The Message of David Swing 

secured to the young and old, that there 
might be some hours of sunlight for those 
delicate plants — faith and spirituality. If 
our Nation, destined in a generation more to 
surpass all upon the globe in power, material 
and mental, desires to be governed by able 
and good men it must see to it that the 
schoolhouse, and the church with its day of 
rest, are kept open, for through these the 
young pass on their way to all great beauty 
of character and usefulness of life. 

It has been the reproach of our country 
that it is not rich in history ; that the mind 
must look beyond the ocean or travel beyond 
the ocean to reach the presence of aU that is 
deemed impressive. We have no venerable 
architecture, no historic church, no places of 
fame, no thi'one-rooms or prisons or towel's 
or crowns or jewels made affecting by the 
annals of a thousand years. This objection 
to our new world is well made ; but this 
poverty of our country is being rapidly ex- 
changed for riches — the riches seen in such 
men as Lincoln and Garfield and similar 
moral products of the Republic. A nation 
will not long remain without history when 
the lives of such men are rapidly entering 
into the great open page. The old world in 
84 



James A. Garfield 

its thousand-year period, reaching from the 
Twelfth Century to the Nineteenth, cannot 
point us to better names — names which stand 
for a better union of intelligence and ability 
and integrity and charity and heroism. Old 
history can point us to violent deaths of rulers, 
and can say here Charles I was beheaded; here 
Mary of the Scots died; here Marat was slain ; 
but our two great presidents have been slain 
not by a multitude which was wronged but 
by private fanatics, in their attack as unau- 
thorized as beasts of prey. While old his- 
tory abounds in instances where men died for 
some sins or wrongs, our new history points 
us to two great leaders who were the un- 
happy victims each of a single wicked heart ; 
and died to gratify no party but amid the 
tears of all parties and factions of the land. 

Rapidly is our country making up a history 
which will surpass those books Ave all read 
in our early years. It cannot be affirmed of 
many of those illustrious ones whose names 
besprinkle the records of human life that they 
surpassed this Garfield in the power to meas- 
ure the wants of society and in the sympathy 
that cannot forget the welfare of the people. 
Where ancient great men trampled about in 
the living fields, this man walked softly, fear- 
85 



The Message of David Swing 

ing lest some flower might be crushed. That 
attachment to the aged mother, that meas- 
ureless attachment to the wife, were only 
evidences that this President was the type 
and product of a new age which was putting 
aside ferocity and was reaching a sensibility 
as to human rights which was not present in 
the men who ruled once those nations which 
now boast of possessing history. The Ameri- 
can pages may not be many, but compara- 
tively they are white. 

Must we not to-day read anew the lesson of 
mortality ? Must not Vv^e who have come into 
this church from the many paths of the world, 
along which paths we too are allured by some 
one of the many forms of ambition and hope, 
feel deeply the undeniable fact that we are all 
hastening to the end ? The closing scene may 
not be tragic, but it is coming. We are 
asked to think of these things by the memory 
of both Lincoln and Garfield, for they were 
both half-melancholy men, the former loving 
pathetic poetry, the latter even writing it. 
Lincoln in the height of his fame would say : 

" The hand of the king that the sceptre hath borne, 
The brow of the priest that the mitre hath worn, 
The eye of the sage and the heart of the brave, 
Are hidden and lost in the depths of the grave. 
86 



James A. Garfield 

" The peasant whose lot was to sow and to reap, 
The herdsman who climbed with his goats up the steep, 
The beggar who wandered in search of his bread, 
Have faded away like the grass that we tread." 

And Garfield in the height of his success 
looked upon the earth of his triumph with 
sad eyes. He was unable to forget that he 
and all he loved were being borne along by 
arms mysterious and powerful. All sensitive 
mmds are pathetic and almost superstitious 
in theu" hours of meditation. The dictates 
of reason are not able to counteract fully the 
deep attachments of the heart to life and 
friends and all the loved ones. When the 
great are warm-hearted they are melancholy 
and most plaintive. May you all possess such 
a pathetic estimate of our earth ; may you 
all see the tombward march of man, so read 
the vanity of riches and fame and home and 
love, that you shall be compelled to become 
children of God and of Jesus Christ,— thus, 
children of the final country that knows no 
funeral pageants, no days of bitter disap- 
pointment. 



87 



IV 

CHARLES SUMNER' 

THE world has always loved to speak of 
the Infinite One as being the " God of 
Nations," because there is a greatness involved 
in the idea of Nation which makes it seem 
worthy of the attention and love of the In- 
finite. It is easy for the individual heart, 
possessed of ordinary humility, to feel quite 
overlooked in the daily administrations of 
Providence, but a nation is something so 
vast in its interests and in its life which lies 
over centuries, that into its great events men 
can generally see descending, in love or 
vrrath, the sublime form of God. Notwith- 
standing the most elaborate and conclusive 
argument that our Heavenly Father is in all 
places and times alike, yet we all go away 
from the argument to confess Him sooner at 
Waterloo than where a child is playing or a 
bird singing ; more visible where slaves are 
shouting in a new liberty than where a 
farmer turns his furrow or the lonely wood- 

1 Died March 11, 1874. 
88 



Charles Sumner 

man swings his axe. Thus marking the 
habits of the human mind, we may perceive 
at least how great a thing is a nation. What 
a vast idea it is, that it always claims the 
care of the Almighty, and almost compels 
the atheist to confess that there is at least a 
nation's God. 

A nation is a second world into which we 
are all born. The first world is only the 
good green earth, with its seasons, and food, 
and labour, and natural vicissitudes ; but 
this is a poor birthplace for a mind or a 
soul, for into these poor, brutish arms falls 
the Indian child or the young Arab. To be 
born into earth alone is a fate that robs a 
birthday of all worth. It is only an animal 
that is born to earth alone. It is only when 
some second world called a " nation " be- 
comes the soul's cradle that it becomes de- 
sirable to fall heir to life. A nation is a 
grand equipment for a career ; it is food, 
and clothes, and friends first, and education, 
and employment, and culture, and religion 
afterwards. It is the atmosphere into which 
the many-winged spirit comes ; and a bird 
might as well spread its wings in a vacuum 
as for a human soul to be born away from 
the treasured-up virtues of a national life. 
89 



The Message of David Swing 

When the rude black face, with retreating 
forehead and great thick lips, meets you on 
the Southern coast, you know that that 
being was born, but you associate with this 
knowledge the other fact that he was born 
to savage Africa. Great beyond all estimate, 
therefore, is the fact of nation, for it shapes 
the soul, and is the joy or sorrow of every 
being that comes into this existence. As 
when, in the setting sun, after a summer 
shower, all things, clouds, hills, trees, and 
even the very grass and the faces of our 
friends standing in the refracted light are 
covered with the tinge of gold, so when man 
is born into a nation he is instantly bathed 
in its light, and sets forth in a double destin}^, 
that of man and that of citizen ; and it is, 
for the most part, the latter destiny that de- 
termines the value of life. When Bunyan 
saw a culprit ascending the steps to the 
gallows, he said : " That were I, but for the 
Grace of God ; " but this Grace does not 
busy itself only with individuals here and 
there, but it marks out a vast realm and 
makes it a great, free, civilized state, and 
then the millions that come into life in its 
blessed confines can, in their later years, 
when they realize the value of the great 
90 



Charles Sumner 

fatherland, say, " I was a savage, a Congo 
negro, but for the Grace of God." 

Next to the grandeur of a planet with a 
thousand millions of people upon its bosom, 
whirling them along through day and night, 
and summer and winter, and youth and 
old age, comes the grandeur of a well- 
equipped State which, for hundreds of years, 
guards the liberty, and industry, and educa- 
tion, and happiness of her dependent millions, 
crowding her influence in upon them gently 
as the atmosphere lies upon the cheek in 
June. Her language, her peculiar genius, 
her ideals, her religion, her freedom, enwrap 
us better than our mother's arms, for the 
State enwraps her too, and wreathes her fore- 
head with a merit that warrants her office and 
her affection. The State is defined to be a 

"... Sovereign law, that with collected will, 
Sits Empress, crowning good, repressing ill. 
Smit by her sacred frown 
The fiend Dissension like a vapour sinks 
And e'en the all dazzling Crown 
Hides his faint rays and at her bidding shrinks." 

"Whence comes this grand instrument 

which, as now existing in our continent, 

under the flag of liberty, pours around forty 

millions of people such a golden air as 

91 



The Message of David Swing 

no millions ever breathed before ? "Who 
gathered these flowers that wreathe equally 
our cradle, our altar, our homes, and our 
whole earthly pilgrimage ? This much of a 
reply is given by human experience : Noth- 
ing comes to man, of excellence, without 
labour. All that man possesses of art, sci- 
ence, or literature, or invention, has come by 
regular payments made in hard toil. As the 
verdure that waves over the whole earth has 
come from the daily sacrifice of the sun's 
heat, so the glory manifold of each great 
nation has come by the path of human sacri- 
fice of thought, and toil, and even life ; and 
so valuable have been the national ideas, 
that, for all the good the world possesses, 
there have been fields baptized with the 
heart's best blood. Young though many of 
the modern free nations may be in their 
present name and form, yet back of each 
one lie a thousand years of active labour, and 
often of deep agony. As geologists now tell 
us that before God fitted up this earth for 
man, while the mists were rising from its 
heated seas, and condensing in the cooler 
upper air, there were often awful storms 
where the thunder rolled incessantly for a 
hundred years ; so each nation which we see 
92 



Charles Sumner 

standing forth now in peace and beauty — 
England, Germany, America — has emerged 
from a thousand-year storm, where the wrath 
of man has rolled in thunder for centuries, 
and the cruel skies have rained blood. On© 
of the poets says : 

'* A thousand yeara scarce serve to form a state." 

And oh ! what years of toil and vicissitude 
they are to the brains which stand at the 
throne, and to the hearts that stand in the 
battle, and to the wido\y and orphan who 
weep when the smoke rolls away and reveals 
the dead ! 

If then a great nation like our own has 
come over a two-thousand-year path under a 
sky of alternate peace and storm, come along 
from free Athens, and free Rome and sacred 
Palestine, there must have been all along 
guardian angels of its long journey, glorious 
leaders of its wilderness march ; souls that 
smote rocks for its thirsty multitudes, and 
prayed down manna in the still night. The 
morals of our day can look back and see 
their Seneca, their Confucius, but chiefly 
their Divine Jesus ; the art of our era looks 
back and beholds its Phidias, its Apelles, its 
Angelo, linking the future and the past ; 
93 



The Message of David Swing 

poetry and all literature look back and cast 
smiles of gratitude to Homer and Thucydides 
and Dante ; the law confesses the deep 
devotion of Cicero and Justinian as minds 
who studied justice when the world seemed 
young. 

And now, beholding this differentiation of 
men by a wise providence of God, so that 
each part of the soul's vast vineyard may 
have some one to love its vines, we reach 
the easy conclusion that the same wisdom 
will permit us always to hold in memory and 
in love men who, turning aside from other 
pursuits, have found in the study and love 
and service of their nation their own special 
path between the cradle and the grave. It 
is a blessed thought that there have risen up 
here and there not only hearts that could 
weave the sweet songs of a Yirgil, and not 
only hands that could paint the pictures of a 
Parrhasius, or that could strike the notes of 
a Mozart ; not only minds that may throw 
up a dome of St. Peter's, or that may as- 
tonish the world with their invention, but 
also other hearts which have loved the idea 
of Nation, and have lived and died not in the 
arms of a friend, but rather in the arms of 
the country. Out of the thoughts and love 
94 



Charles Sumner 

and specialization of these great ones we, 
humbler children of the State, have all 
drawn our happiness and freedom, as the vio- 
lets are invited into life by the all-loving sun. 
In the week past the grave has opened 
suddenly and taken back one of these souls 
which seem sent of God to know nothing 
else but their country, as Paul knew nothing 
else but the Cross. Into that tomb which 
grows wider each year and has received 
away from our sight "Washington and the 
Adamses and Jefferson and Clay and Webster 
and Lincoln, at last has been gathered one 
more name wreathed as heavily as any with 
the glorious ideas and honours of our great 
Republic. Napoleon loved not a nation, but 
his own power. He was a student not of 
justice, but of crowns ; he studied how to 
destroy other diadems, and of their jewels 
weave one for himself. 

" The triumph and the vanity, 

The rapture of the strife, 
The earthquake voice of victory, 

To thee the breath of life ; 
The sword, the sceptre, and that sway, 

Which mau seemed made but to obey, 
Wherewith renown was rife. 

All quell'd ! Dark Spirit, what must be 
The madness of thy memory ! " 

95 



The Message of David Swing 

But the memory of that Ufe just ended has 
no madness in it, but is all a remembrance 
of honour, and charity, and peace. 

It seems especially fitting the day and place 
that we should devote this hour to thoughts 
over this fresh tomb, for the greatness of Mr. 
Sumner's career is strangely interwoven with 
some of the noblest ideas of Christianity ; 
and l^this union was not accidental, nor pru- 
dential, but spiritual and intellectual, for Mr. 
Sumner in his life, devoted to humanity, so 
framed all his arguments, and so based them 
upon the philosophy of Christ that the per- 
petual return of the terms Christianity and 
Saviour betrays the fact that much of his 
eloquence was only the Sermon upon the 
Mount applied, not to the future of the soul, 
but to the true, earthly progress of mankind. 
If any group of philosophers were to sit 
down with the Life of Christ in their hands, 
with the desire to elaborate a political con- 
stitution from its pages, among the many 
principles they would bring forth we should 
at once certainly find these — peace, justice, 
and equality. From justice would instantly 
come liberty. Now of that eventful life 
whose untimely ending drapes this day with 
sorrow, these three Christian ideas, peace, 
96 



Charles Sumner 

liberty, and equality, were the opening and 
final strain, the matin and the vesper. The 
public career of Mr. Sumner began by that 
unrivalled oration spoken thirty years ago 
upon peace as the source of national gran- 
deur ; and without any deviation, any falter- 
ing along this path, he is found at last on the 
border of death, asking Congress not to paint 
upon its flags of the present and future the 
names of battles where brothers fought. His 
life was all set to one music, and it was a 
heavenly strain without discord. 

But before I ask you to think of those 
three great ideas, in which Mr. Sumner did 
great service for the Christianity out of which 
he took the ideas, and the Christlike spirit, 
too, permit me to aj)ologize, so far as it may 
be necessary, for the marble coldness which 
has long been associated with this eminent 
character. Let us empty our minds of this 
prejudice. A public man, writing a private 
letter since the death of this senator, says : 
" He was cold as a statue. He was a child 
of principles and books, and consequently 
had little in common with the humanities of 
life. ... I cannot speak of him generally in 
this regard ; but in the few times in which I 
dined with him at Mr. Lincoln's table, he 
97 



The Message of David Swing 

was a pleasant dinner companion, and con' 
versed happily and instructively; but such 
times were only little outbreaks of sunlight. 
In the main, he was behind the cloud, and, 
while full of gentle humanity, he moved 
among individuals evolving an austere sense 
of superiority." Against the truth of these 
statements from one who had the opportunity 
and the discrimination for reading well the 
qualities of this distinguished man, we would 
say nothing; indeed, the portraiture just 
given may be confessed to be suflB.ciently 
correct. But that he was capable of deep 
friendship is fully seen in his attachment to 
the loved President, whose house was so dear 
to him that he repaired there daily as to a 
sacred home where he loved all and was also 
deeply loved. 

Passing by this inquiry, I only wish to 
remind you that ail the great intellectual 
development which the world has ever seen 
has been reached at the cost of the heart. 
" Where the treasure is," says the Bible, 
" there the heart will be also " ; and hence, 
when an old scholar of the dark ages found 
his love of thought increasing, he began to 
withdraw from the streets, and to find, in 
some monastic cell, all of the world that any 
98 



Charles Sumner 

longer remained in his heart ; and although 
the dark ages are gone, and the monasteries 
are dust, yet the principle remains that, 
when the intellect weds itself fully to cer- 
tain paths of study and toil, the heart soon 
sunders the other many sweet and beautiful 
associations of the wide world, and casts its 
love upon that realm only to which the in- 
tellect may have wedded itself for better or 
for worse, for richer or poorer. It is an un- 
conscious sacrifice which genius is always 
compelled to make ; but it is no more visible 
over the grave of Sumner than over the 
grave of Mill in philosophy, or Pascal in 
metaphysics, or Angelo in art, or Cicero in 
law and letters. It is written in all history 
that a life of thought is a constant warfare 
against a life of sociability and cheerfulness 
and love. Instead of recalling the marble 
coldness of past illustrious men as a blemish 
or a fault in their character, we only indicate 
a common fact, and we would bury the de- 
fect forever under offerings of gratitude, 
that there have come here and there souls 
which, for the development of great, useful 
ideas, have been able to abandon what we 
mortals in a humbler vale call the varied 
pleasures of Ufe. But they have not so 
99 



The Message of David Swing 

much lost happiness as exchanged that of 
sense for that of spirit. 

Turning aside now from this apology, let 
us rejoice that if it was the fate of the 
lamented senator to live for only a part of 
earth and for only a part of religion, that it 
pleased him to live for so magnificent a part 
of both politics and religion as is found in 
the words peace, justice, and liberty. 

It was not Mr. Sumner, you remember, 
who advised the partnership of Bibles and 
rifles in the early days of Kansas. No, in 
all this forty years of public life, Mr. Sumner 
stood by the power of argument, of light, of 
Christian civilization alone. His hymn was 
the poet's psalm of peace : 

" Were half the power that fills the world with terror, 
Were half the wealth bestowed ou camps and courts, 
Given to redeem the human miud from error, 
There were no need of arsenals or forts. 

" The warrior's name would be a name abhorred, 
And every nation that should lift again 
Its hand against a brother, on its forehead 
Would wear, forever more, the curse of Cain." 

In the pulpits of the whole land the Gospel 
doctrines had, for the most part, been applied 
to only individual w^elfare, and chiefly to 

lOO 



Charles Sumner 

that welfare beyond the confines of states — 
beyond the grave. Afraid, for the most 
part, to preach what they called politics ; 
and having, to an alarming extent, such a 
bad politics -that it was perhaps fortunate 
that they remained silent even by a theo- 
logical mistake, the Christian ministry had, 
in the last generations, left the gospel of 
nations to be preached by the few disciples 
of "WiUiam Penn and by such virtual Quakers 
as Channing and Whittier, and Sumner, the 
greatest of all. Upon him there was no 
restraint. No false creed, no temporary 
policy such as influenced Webster and Clay, 
no fear of violence, no fear of public scorn, 
either from Boston or New Orleans, ever 
held him in any conceivable chain, but from 
him, the freest man our country ever had in 
its dark days, came the gospel of nations in 
all its Bethlehem beauty of truth and spirit. 
In the present, and more yet, in the near and 
far future, the pulpit will confess that 
Charles Sumner was a minister at its altar 
in dark days when it was afraid, and in doc- 
trines to the grandeur of which it had not 
the intellect, nor the courage, nor the hu- 
manity to ascend. Penn and Channing and 
Sumner came in with that part of Christian- 

lOI 



The Message of David Swing 

ity which belongs to the constitution of na- 
tions ; and when we remember that a grand, 
free, enlightened State is the land in which 
the Cross can ever be reared with most suc- 
cess, the orators who, upon the field of 
statesmanship, apply to society the three 
Christian doctrines of peace, liberty and 
justice, must be confessed to be standing 
very near the holiest ministers of religion. 
As the church helped Mr. Sumner, gave him 
hearts willing to listen to his long argument, 
so he helped the church by sending back to 
it men who evermore tried to combine the 
character of Christian with the character of 
citizen. 

But Mr. Sumner's attachment to peace was 
no more absorbing and unbending than his 
devotion to liberty. For liberty is twin 
sister of peace, as bondage is the companion 
of violence. As Franklin gloried in saying 
" Where liberty is there is my country," 
Sumner equally gloried in saying "Where 
liberty is there is my party." Down this 
channel of freedom, for white slaves in 
Barbary, and for black slaves in America, he 
poured a torrent of eloquence for twenty-five 
years, a stream of argument, which gathering 
up the wisdom of Greece and Rome, the ex- 

102 



Charles Sumner 

perience of England, the battle-shouts of 
Marathon and Bunker Hill, the blest vision 
of all the poets, the longings of Washington 
and Jefferson, and then bedecking the stream 
with flowers of a gorgeous rhetoric growing 
upon either bank, moved along like an 
Amazon towards the sea. It has been said 
recently by a public man, that Mr. Sumner 
"surpassed all statesmen in the love and 
study of the right." It was this deep pre- 
possession that led him to espouse the cause 
of the slave. "Words which he himself applied 
to Channing thirty years ago return now to 
settle upon his own forehead. " Follow my 
white plume," said the chivalrous monarch 
of France. Follow the rights more resplend- 
ent than plume or oriflamme, was the watch- 
word of Sumner. But all this long history 
you know well, for in this hour when death 
has come to quicken our memory and love, 
an hour which makes an enemy a friend, all 
that past struggle for the slave's freedom, and 
the discord of the Missouri Compromise down 
to the death of Mr. Lincoln, a tragedy which 
closed the long, awful drama, flashes through 
your hearts with no detail of sadness left out. 
Eecall the great pageant and see this white 
face above the common mortals. 
103 



The Message of David Swing 

But to-day, we can only turn aside from 
the usual themes of the sacred desk to bless 
the heavenly Father for this child that came 
in the name of that form of civilization which 
finds its best exponent in the Saviour of man- 
kind, and bless Him that there was one tongue 
which for a generation made the best elo- 
quence of this free land beam with the light of 
Him whose gospel is not only a perfect salva- 
tion, but a perfect civilization, — the vital air, 
not only of a saint, but of a citizen. And we 
cannot close these thoughts without asking 
you to read in this urn of perishable dust, but 
of imperishable memory, a lesson of hope 
which may serve us all in coming days, per- 
haps of the country, but surely of our own 
heart. When government, and pulpit, and 
press were voiceless and hopeless as to a time 
when the Nation's flag should be freed from 
its last reproach, this mental sight which is 
closed now saw plainly in the future a day 
when all the States would be free, and when 
the national banner would proclaim liberty 
and justice wherever it should wave. His 
was a hopefulness which nothing but death 
could abate ; and blest with such a prophetic, 
almost inspired sense, he, in all the years of 
our civil war, was calm, and was to Mr. 
104 



Charles Sumner 

Lincoln, upon whose mind and heart a burden 
rested which would have wearied an Atlas 
accustomed to uphold the globe, a daily 
messenger of faith and hope in both man and 
God. Perhaps the marble-like nature of the 
statesman was a peace and strength to a 
president whose heart was always full of ten- 
derness and melancholy strangely mingled. 
That immense power of hope which has 
always attended men of ideals, the angel of 
their need, accompanied Mr. Sumner in all 
hours, and held him up far above the discord 
of the passing time. A poem Avhich he 
greatly loved shows us what kind of a hymn 
sounded in the sky over his daily toil. It 
inspired him in the night watches : 

" There's a fount about to stream, 
There's a light about to beam, 
There's a warmth about to glow, 
There's a flower about to blow. 
There's a midnight blackness changing 

Into gray ; 
Men of thought and men of action, 

Clear the way ! ' ' 

Oh ! why may not the pulpit and each 

Christian rise to this calm atmosphere of a 

trust in God, and as this statesman always 

saw liberty and justice about to come down 

105 



The Message of David Swing 

out of God's sky, why may not the soldier of 
the cross daily say to his soul 

" There's a fount about to stream, 
There's a light about to beam,*' 

and live in this magnificent hope ? 

But our time has passed. Much of our 
country's mental and moral glory has gone 
down in past years. We seem to have 
only an evening horizon into which golden 
suns sink, but from which none arise. The 
melancholy gate of death by which these 
souls depart seems wider than the gates of 
life by which such glorious beings are march- 
ing towards our bereaved hearts. Yet this 
apparent triumph of the grave may come 
from the fact that we can see the past in all 
its desolation, but cannot unveil the future 
and see its compensating good. We can only 
hope that the gates of God's mercy are as 
Avide as the gates of His death, and that the 
solemn West into which these lights are sink- 
ing from our sky may, by its shadows, 
remind us that there is an Eastern heaven 
radiant with divine love, upon whose bosom 
other orbs will appear, resplendent with 
peace, justice, and liberty. 



1 06 



V 

WENDELL PHILLIPS^ 

AS these deaths of the great occur, they 
become more and more painful, be- 
cause the group of heroes grows smaller, and 
the loss of one more great soul is the more 
deeply felt. It has not been many years since 
our Nation was rich in the style of manhood 
represented by him who has just been buried. 
We could see, not long ago. Chase and Par- 
ker, Sumner and Henry Wilson and Lincoln 
and Greeley and Gerrit Smith and Garrison, 
and others of similar power ; but as the years 
have gone by, these have gone with them, and 
so small at last has the group become, that 
upon each new invasion of death, we all won- 
der if any one remains to be a golden link 
between the present and the past. So rapidly 
do these noble chieftains fall into the tomb 
that many of the young minds of to-day will 
never see any one of these noble faces, but 
will be compelled to find their souls only in 

» Died February 2, 1884. 
107 



The Message of David Swing 

Jiistory. Those of you who have seen and 
heard all these great Americans, from Web- 
ster to Phillips, may well be proud now of 
such a memory. They surpassed the sculp- 
tor and painter and poet and musician, for 
while those artists give us the decorations 
and pleasures of life, these statesmen helped 
lay the foundations of liberty, and hence 
of all that leans upon liberty for support. 
Art, education, commerce, industry, science, 
and religion, have drawn life from these 
master-builders in the political temple. An- 
gelo and Raphael in art are outdone by 
these pioneers in the career of our republic. 
Art comes only to a few ; a great country 
empties her blessings upon all the millions, 
and what blessings they are ! 

A religious, political mind like that of 
Wendell Phillips possesses in the formative 
years of a nation a worth we can with diffi- 
culty measure ; certainly we cannot rate it 
at too high a price. In 1836 this man, then 
fresh from the schools and college, and with 
a mind blessed far beyond the lot of common 
mortals, turned aside from profession and 
traffic, to give his hand and heart to one 
single cause, the emancipation of his coun- 
try's slaves. From 1836 to 1863, that is, for 
io8 



Wendell Phillips 

twenty-seven years, he turned the river of 
his eloquence down thi'ough that barren and 
dangerous plain. For not many men of 
even Boston birth and culture touched foot 
in that day upon the land of negro freedom. 
It was like the forest that lay before Dante 
in his di'eam, full of wild, ravenous beasts — 
the wolf of avarice, the leopard of sin, the 
lion of power. The merchants were in- 
fluenced by the wolf of avarice, the fashion- 
able people by the leopard of sin, the poli- 
ticians by the lion of power. Dante, in pres- 
ence of these beasts, determined to rise 
above them and dream of, and visit heaven. 
So Phillips, in his glory of youth and genius, 
resolved to rise above all these destroyers 
and find those heights where no wild beast 
has a lair — heights towards the throne of 
peace and right. To have made such a 
choice seems easy now, but had this entire 
audience been citizens of Boston at that 
date, it may be that no one of us would have 
offered hand or heart to the pleading slave. 
The tide of ISTew England sentiment flowed 
towards the cotton which grew at the bid- 
ding of the slave ; and to touch slavery was 
assumed the same as making the grass to 
grow in the manufacturing streets. Thus an 
109 



The Message of David Swing 

Abolitionist was deemed an enemy of the 
land once occupied by the Puritans. 

When, in about 1840, some one became 
bold enough to bring Frederick Douglass 
into Boston to preach in a prominent church 
upon the condition and rights of the slaves, 
no one dared to invite him home to dinner 
after the morning service ; but all left the 
eloquent ex-slave to pass the afternoon 
among the tombstones in the churchyard — 
perhaps stones in memory of those who had 
sailed from Europe or England to establish 
liberty. It was at such a time of bondage to 
commerce and manufactures and of cruelty 
towards man, that Mr. Phillips made the 
vow of consecration to the cause of freedom. 

Our country thus suffers the loss of one 
who, born in the highest rank of society, de- 
clmed its luxury and exclusiveness, and, 
Christlike, went down to the humble world 
of the African to be his friend. It was an 
immense gain for the general cause of hu- 
manity ; for not only came thus to that cause 
a warm heart and a brave soul, but there 
came the finest orator of the century — a 
mind as calm as the blue sky, as fascinating 
as the summer time, and yet as powerful as 
the earthquakes and torrents and tempests. 
no 



Wendell Phillips 

Yery often the poor of earth have had to 
accept of the services of some man whose 
mind was untrained, whose reason was weak, 
whose judgment was quick and ill founded, 
whose information small, but such was not 
the misfortune of our African millions in 
their later years. There came to their aid 
the best sons the world could produce — 
Theodore Parker, Horace Mann, Thomas 
Starr King, Chaiies Sumner and Wendell 
Phillips. From such brains and souls there 
poured forth for twenty-five years a stream 
of matchless eloquence which prepared the 
Nation for that day when ideas would be 
compelled to make a final struggle upon the 
battle-field. In the first years of the liberty 
movement the slave had few friends in the 
IS'orth, but what he had were of rare quality. 
Slavery held the trade of New England ; 
freedom gradually won her intellect and 
heart ; slavery held the cotton-mill, freedom 
the library ; slavery was represented by a 
policeman with a metallic star on his breast 
and a club in his hand ; freedom was repre- 
sented by an orator whose forehead was as 
proud as that of Apollo and whose lips were 
like those of Perioles ; the ship-load of cotton 
from the Georgia plantations became at last 
III 



The Message of David Swing 

less valuable than the divine philosophy upon 
New England soil, and in the sharp conflict 
between merchant and orator the orator won. 

Gone are all those days of mingled light 
and darkness, hope and fear, great virtues 
and great sins, but this recent death has re- 
called the past, and may well awaken in our 
bosoms gratitude to God that He gave to our 
Nation the men needed in its successive hours. 
We should be dull and ungrateful children 
should we not see the many-coloured glory of 
those past years and realize that He who 
planted flowers and made the ocean and the 
stars is the One who created oratory out of 
the dust and clothed it also with beauty and 
power. Oratory is the universe bursting out 
into speech. 

It is not a pertinent inquiry whether Mr. 
Phillips might not have accomplished more 
for the times had he harmonized more with 
the local and central Government and had 
he been more closely allied to senates and 
cabinets. Such questions belong rather to 
some shop of biography or history. Two 
thoughts in that matter will suffice us to-day ; 
the one, that his life as it stands was so full 
of the true and good that we should seem 
greedy beggars should we demand more. To 

112 



Wendell Phillips 

come along with our perfect ideal of a states- 
man or a philanthropist, and to set about 
comparing our golden and divine mask with 
this dead human face would be only an illus- 
tration of our meanness and injustice. In- 
stead of coming forward with our portrait 
painted after the fact, after the long battle 
and the death, we should rather come with 
the wonder what heroism or perfection we 
would have shown had we lived in that New 
England city while those times of dull con- 
science and bridled tongue were passing 
slowly by. Nor can we determine now just 
how great a crime it was not to vote at the 
elections nor seek the duties of a government 
which could open its new Territories to the 
system of slavery, and which could compel a 
Northern man to help capture and return a 
fugitive from bondage. So difficult are these 
problems that we may well thank God for 
what of pure truth and nobleness there came 
into the Nation's mind from these now word- 
less lips. Their eloquence was at least of 
grand quality, as powerful and beautiful as 
it was useful. 

The second apologetic thought is this — 
that no age calls for men of similar mental 
and emotional structure, for men who will 
113 



The Message of David Swing 

all vote and seek and hold office and blend 
into one common picture. In the whole 
history of our race there has been a constant 
call for a variety ^vhich would not permit 
any two leaders to resemble each other. 
Hence biographers can with difficulty find 
parallels. They attempt to find some resem- 
blance between Dante and Milton, or Savo- 
narola and Luther, Burke and Webster, but 
after rhetoric and research have toiled hard 
at the comparison, there stands on the one 
hand Savonarola, and on the other Luther, 
with a measureless and mysterious space be- 
tween. JSTature never repeats any form of 
greatness. Plato was not Socrates, Yirgil 
was not Homer, Washington was not Crom- 
well, Wendell Phillips Avas not Abraham 
Lincoln. Thus moves onward the vast 
human race, lifting up its vast sons in her 
loving arms, but with no duplicate ever of 
face, or brain, or heart. And thus did the 
march of events train and inform and call 
and adopt and employ for a lifetime this 
man now of world-wide fame. His age cre- 
ated him for its special service. 

^Nothing more loudly proclaims the being 
of a God than His perpetual procession of 
such gifted mortals. Look at a single group 
114 



Wendell Phillips 

of them as springing up in one single city ; 
Everett, Webster, Sumner, Longfellow, Emer- 
son, and in all a large assemblage of titanic 
brothers, able by joining hands to move the 
world. And to that one city add other 
places on our globe, where man has unfolded 
his power, places between London and old 
Athens ; add names from Pitt to Demos- 
thenes, and what holy ground our earth be- 
comes ! We forget the sins and follies of the 
common millions, and pass easily from these 
giants in mind and morals to the presence of 
a Creator, Listening to their spoken words 
or reading their volumes, we realize at once 
the grandeur of man, the divineness of his 
exploits, and the probable glory of his final 
destiny. While near the common roaring of 
wheels, or while amid the perishable decora- 
tions of fashion, or in the midst of its vivacity 
and laughter, man may seem an ephemeral 
insect, but the scene all changes when we 
meet the great in their ordained paths, their 
forms seem larger than life, and their faces 
seem to contain some mysterious proofs of 
immortality. 

When Wendell Phillips began his public 
life evangelical . Christianity did not look 
upon him as an ally. It was thought that 
115 



The Message of David Swing 

such orators as Parker and Phillips would 
lead thousands to spiritual ruin, and some 
clergymen even prayed that Providence 
might remove Theodore Parker from this 
existence. These two were counted as the 
Church's enemies ; but such have been the 
changes in thought and argument and in the 
questions of debate that no doubt the Chris- 
tian world rejoices to-day when it recalls an 
eloquence w^hich founded itself upon the 
being of the heavenly Father, and the pres- 
ence everywhere of a " higher law." The 
wit and anecdote and irony and awful 
denunciation of Phillips seldom ran onward 
many minutes without some appeal to the 
existence and justice of God. When the tele- 
graph flashed to Boston that Mr. Lincoln 
had been elected and a joyous crowd as- 
sembled in Tremont Temple to hear what 
Mr. Phillips would say, he closed his memo- 
rable speech by these words of new hope : 
" Once plant deep in the Nation's heart the 
love of right, let there grow out of it a firm 
purpose of duty, and then from the higher 
plane of Christian manhood we can put 
aside on the right hand and left all narrow, 
childish and mercenary considerations. For 
us, the children of a pure civilization, the 
ii6 



Wendell Phillips 

pioneers of a Christian future, it is for us to 
found a capitol whose corner-stone shall be 
justice, whose top stone liberty ; within the 
sacred precincts of whose Holy of Holies 
shall dwell One who is no respecter of per- 
sons, but hath made of one blood all the 
nations of the earth. Crowding to the 
shelter of its stately arches I see old and 
young, learned and ignorant, rich and poor, 
native and foreign, Pagan, Jew and Christian, 
black and white, in one glad, harmonious, 
triumphant procession." 

In that far-off day the Church was not able 
to see religion where it could not see Ortho- 
doxy, and therefore the deep Christianity of 
Parker and Mann and Phillips was not con- 
fessed ; but in our day atheism has invaded 
the field of eloquence and has created a black 
cloud upon which the belief of Phillips bends 
plainly all its colours of righteousness and 
love and hope. All that anti-slavery which 
echoed through the ISTation for twenty-five 
years was based upon the laws of the Al- 
mighty, and what confession the Church 
could not make while those men were living 
it will make at last over their graves. 

In those years which lay between 1840 and 
1860 the languishing minds of public men 
117 



The Message of David Swing 

and private citizens, of preachers and writers, 
needed plain words, sharp and rude. It was 
a period of general hesitation and weakness. 
Into such a dead atmosphere PhiUips moved 
with the vehemence of a storm. No man, 
living or dead, equals this name in the power 
of cutting speech, the power of statement, of 
citation of instance, of application, and of 
never bending pursuit of one end. In the 
hottest days of the struggle the eloquence of 
Wendell Phillips ran not like a mad torrent 
but as a deep stream of fire. It scorched 
what it touched of wrong and folly. It was 
well that not all were like him, for we needed 
the tenderness of Lincoln as much as this 
volcanic flame; but Mr. Phillips performed 
his part in the drama of liberty, and per- 
formed it well. 

It will become an impressive picture in 
history, — that of this husband and wife ded- 
icating themselves, their time and fortune 
to one noble enterpise ; so noble that it dwarfs 
the common ends and aids of to-day. This 
work displaced their love of furniture and 
drapery and silks and broadcloth and fashion- 
able life, and arose before them as sweet as 
the Star of Bethlehem before the wise men of 
the East. These two said to Liberty : " We 
Ii8 



Wendell Phillips 

have seen thy star and have come to worship 
thee," and opening their treasures of intellect 
and soul, they presented unto this Liberty 
their gold and frankincense and myrrh. 

Beyond doubt Mr, Phillips made many 
mistakes, and was not as acute to measure 
the value of the Union as to feel the wrong 
of slavery. He could see a poor man or poor 
woman or child further than he could see a 
Nation. Demosthenes went around with 
his eloquence to induce the Greek states to 
unite ; he failed, and Greece was ruined. 
Phillips on the opposite urged the American 
States to separate ; he failed and the Nation 
was saved. But after we have estimated at 
their full demerit all the errors of this man, 
he remains the purest and strongest friend 
the lower classes ever possessed on this side 
the sea. He could not see anything ex- 
cept the rights of man. What the classics 
had recorded upon that subject, the apho- 
risms in the past or in the present, in Cicero 
or De Tocqueville, in incidents, in history, 
the great or wandering poems of any place 
or time having liberty and equality in their 
words or verses, sank into memory and came 
forth in his speeches as at Arethusa an un- 
derground river bursts forth. 
119 



The Message of David Swing 

Bat all this brilliant and lofty and cut 
ting oratory has passed by. It was over- 
thrown not b}^ this new grave but by the 
freedom of man and by the grand reunion of 
the States. Thus this eloquence ended with 
the ending of its cause. What gratitude 
should fill our hearts that the Nation needs 
no more such an oratory of wormwood, but 
asks now for the literature of a brotherhood 
and for lives full of all noble action ! Per- 
haps in years not far away the South herself 
when she shall look with pride upon her en- 
larged cities and industries and upon millions 
as rich and happy as her sky is gentle and 
blue, will count among her friends the name 
of him who once seemed such a reckless 
enemy. The apparent foes of to-day are 
often the real friends of to-morrow. 

What are the inferences from this life ? 
One is that the cause of man, Avhich pos- 
sessed such simplicity in the former gener- 
ation, possesses still all that physical and 
spiritual worth. There is no end to this 
service to society. Washington's camp on 
the Delaware would have been in vain had 
it not been followed by the schoolhouse and 
the church on the Ohio and Mississippi and 
the Lakes. Thus, each step of a great man 

120 



Wendell Phillips 

involves another step by a successor. Cicero 
said that a man who helps save a country is 
as worthy as one who founded it. Thus, 
merit is a golden chain of which, each gener- 
ation is a link. The chain falls weak and 
worthless when any generation makes a 
feeble link. The task resting upon the new 
men and new women — all children when 
Parker and Phillips were in all their glory 
of wrath and love — is one of the same old 
greatness, that of leading onward and yet 
onward the public, for which so many lived 
and died. 

A second inference is one of both rhetoric 
and religion. The world calls Wendell 
Phillips eloquent. What is eloquence? A 
difficult question ; but we may approach it by 
indirection. What is great music ? Certainly 
not a dance or a waltz, because the theme 
or emotion is too childish. A Marseillaise 
hymn will illustrate great music because all 
that pathos and beauty of sound reposes 
upon the worth and history of impressive 
France. What is architecture ? Surely not 
the building of a bookcase or a fireplace or a 
portico ; but the rearing of some structure 
under which is some great thought, a library, 
a gallery, a kingdom, a worship of the Al- 
121 , 



The Message of David Swing 

mighty. The greater the idea, the greater 
the architecture ; hence most of the won- 
derful piles of earth repose upon religion — 
two worlds, the one here and the one here- 
after. Such thoughts may bring us near to 
a definition. Eloquence is the adequate 
trea,tment of a vast theme. The theme sends 
its greatness up into the words as the falling 
waters of Niagara send into the woods afar 
in the still night the strange outline of their 
thundering. A great mind treating a great 
theme are the two elements needed to make 
eloquence. In Phillips these met. In "Web- 
ster they met for a time, but afterwards they 
parted. They are seen joining in Burke and 
Pitt. They combined in Robert IngersoU 
when he spoke in memory of the soldiers 
and saw " the past rise up before him like a 
dream," but they part when the same gifted 
speaker discourses against the being of a 
God and the hope of a second life ; the great 
mind runs on from hour to hour, but the 
theme is wanting and there is no oratory 
possible in the case. Eloquence is therefore 
a great treatment of a great subject. 

PhiUips saw the human race all standing 
together as children of God. God had made 
their world ; had made the soil, the seasons, 

122 



Wendell Phillips 

the human hand and heart and genius, had 
given laws whose obedience would bring 
happiness ; and from such a premise Wendell 
Phillips moved outward towards the vision 
of Human Liberty and Equality. His mem- 
ory bids us remember ever that glorious word, 
Freedom. 



123 



Yl 

HENRY WAED BEECHER' 

THIS is a peculiar day [March 12, 1887]. 
It is the first Sunday of more than 
fifty years whose morning has not called Mr. 
Beecher to the sanctuary ; the first morning 
in which he could not obey such a blessed 
invitation. In a series of spring-times which, 
in the retrospect, seems interminable, Mr. 
Beecher has responded like a child to the 
invitations of sunshine, bird, and blossom to 
grasp anew God's world and man's world ; 
he has rushed joyfully forth for more than 
seventy years and has extracted from the 
seasons colours and perfumes to be woven 
into his speech. This spring ends all the 
running out and in of that soul, and we have 
come upon a Sunday and a March which 
sing no longer any kind of carol or psalm to 
that heart. In those budding months, when 
Freedom was attempting to find a home in 
Kansas, this orator of the people was in our 

' Died March 8, 1887. 
124 



Henry Ward Beecher 

world ; in that March when Mr. Lincoln was 
journeying to Washington, Mr. Beecher was 
here, visible as the continent. It is no com- 
mon event that we have now come to the 
end of this long, lasting and brilliant spec- 

Mr. Beecher's greatest years were only 
twenty in number, lying between 1845 and 
1865. That group of twenty years was made 
tremendous by the great ideas which lay- 
beneath them. These great years would 
have been thirty had not his large themes 
died from fulfillment. We cannot find fault 
with good dreams which suddenly end by 
coming true. His mind and body were 
equal to a longer service, but England needed 
no longer any instruction as to America; 
Kansas needed no more intercession; the 
slaves needed no more of the eloquence of 
abolition. The cathedral of liberty had been 
completed and the architect had only to go 
inside and become a worshipper. For twenty 
years this wonderful man worked for the 
human race, then he wrought twenty more 
years for his parish, this last score of summers 
being also full of power, but not to be com- 
pared with the. time when the toil was for 
the Nation, and the tasks the gi-eatest upon 



The Message of David Swing 

earth. In the greater period he seemed 
under the employ of the people to plead their 
cause in politics and religion. His pulpit 
moved around in the daily press, and was on 
the banks of the Ohio and the Missouri, 
while, as the old Scottish clans sprang forth 
from the bushes when their chieftain gave a 
blast on his trumpet, the audiences of this 
evangelist issued at his call from all the 
hills of the East and the waving grass of the 
West. In times of deep distress the slaves' 
souls cried out with the Scotch poet ; 

"Oh, for a blast of that dread born, 
On Fontafabian echoes borne ! " 

The public service of Daniel Webster did 
not cover so wide a space in time ; nor did 
the great career of Abraham Lincoln take in 
so many circles of the sun ; to Mr. Beecher 
must be given the fame and gratitude for a 
battle long fought, and well fought, to the 
final perfect triumph. 

The philosophy of his history was about of 
this outline. He was an inborn, vast genius, 
so sensitive that he became Americanized 
easily and deeply. As Angelo under Italy 
and the Medici became coloured by art, as 
126 



Henry Ward Beecher 

Goethe absorbed all the sweet odours and be- 
wildering fancy of Germany, as Shakespeare 
caught all of his age in his wide mental drag- 
net, thus Henry Ward Beecher was American- 
ized, and from his brain came forth an 
American Politics and an American Keligion. 
These two structures arose at the same time, 
whether side by side, or one within the other, 
cannot be affirmed. You may if you choose 
say the new politics was the external temple, 
the new religion a golden altar within. It 
will matter little what form of figure the 
thought may assume, the truth remains that 
under the hand of this one workman there 
sprang up a new form of both politics and re- 
ligion. The rationalism and humanity which 
led slaves up out of bondage could not do 
otherwise than lead God's children out of old 
Puritanism with its election, reprobation, and 
literal and eternal fire. For twenty years 
without intermission rolled forth this elo- 
quence about justice as between man and 
man and as between God and man. 

The son inherited from his father the dis- 
position and the courage to become practical 
and do the best things for an age and in the 
best light of an age. Lyman Beecher came 
into this world for the purpose of seeing it. 
127 



The Message of David Swing 

His eye was never closed, his tongue never 
tied. His speech was clear and sharp. He 
found drinking whiskies and brandies a 
habit of even the clergy. The moment he 
saw this serpent's head he struck at it. The 
clergy had listened to it as did their weak 
mother, but when Lyman Beecher came 
along he denounced the serpent as a falsifier, 
and began pounding it. 

A few of his words will tell us how mental 
qualities are transmitted sometimes from 
parent to child. When Henry was a little 
boy the father said of intemperance : " Our 
vices are digging the grave of our liberties 
and preparing to entomb our glory. We 
may despise admonition, but our destruction 
slumbereth not. The enormous consumption 
of ardent spirits in our land will produce 
neither minds nor bodies like those which are 
the offspring of temperance and virtue. Our 
constitutions, civil and religious, have lost 
that domestic discipline and official vigilance 
in magistrates which render obedience easy 
and habitual. Drunkards reel through the 
streets day after day and year after year 
with' entire impunity." Such were the lan- 
guage, the clear diction, the practical gospel 
of the father. The son would have taken 
128 



Henry Ward Beecher 

this question of temperance had not the slave 
become more conspicuous than the drunkard, 
and had not the question of a temperate 
ISTation been overwhelmed by the question 
of national existence. The father had said 
" Let us have no grog-shop in the Eepublic ; " 
the son said " Let us first have a republic." 
Thus the clear stream of healing eloquence 
which began in the old New England father 
widened and deepened in the bosom of the 
child, but it was the same river flowing for 
the healing of the Nation. 

When Henry was a young man studying 
theology in Cincinnati in the seminary of 
which his father was the theological head, 
some clergyman arose in the surrounding 
darkness and arraigned the father for hold- 
ing and teaching heresy. The heresy lay in 
teaching that the will of the natural man 
possessed some freedom of choice ; that 
Christ's atonement oif ered its merits to all ; 
that eternal death did not come to us because 
of Adam's sin. The trial was an effort to 
make the Nineteenth Century conform to the 
barbarian wisdom of the Fifteenth, to make 
the Mississippi Yalley love the asceticism of 
the old desert, the fatalism of the old East. 
In this trial came as a collateral issue an 
129 



The Message of David Swing 

opinion regarding the right of holding prop- 
erty in slaves. As Lyman Beecher shrunk 
somewhat from the old dogmas, the son 
doubled the emotion and fled from this old 
schoolism, as he himself said, " sick of the 
whole medley." " How I hated this abyss 
of whirling controversy which seemed full 
of all manner of evil things, with everything 
in it, indeed, but Christ ! " "When he began 
to preach at times across the river in Ken- 
tucky, to about thirty or forty people, some 
hearer said : " He was a smart young man 
but he harped all the time upon one things 
the sympathy of Christ." But this was the 
kind of harping w^hich the Nation most 
needed. The slave-master needed the spirit 
of Christ, the slave needed Christian sym- 
pathy, the sinner needed the intercession and 
persuasion of Christ, the drunkard needed the 
Christian manhood. Thus the young clergy- 
man's religion shaping itself in 1838 became 
from necessity both a religion and a politics 
because the greatest question in politics in 
those times was a religious question. 

There is now a generation in active life in 

om' land who did not see the uprising of this 

eminent man, and hence they cannot measure 

the height of his well-earned fame. Our 

130 



Henry Ward Beecher 

land is not mourning for a great writer : 
Irving and Macaulay had more historic lore 
and literary grace than Mr. Beecher pos- 
sessed ; Longfellow more and better poetry ; 
Lamartine and Coleridge could surpass him in 
describing nature ; Winkelmann and Ruskin 
were greater in delineating merit and demerit 
in art. A heart or a mind of a type differing 
from all these immortals has found the end 
in death. Beecher joined the benevolence 
of a Wilberforce to the eloquence of a Henry 
Clay or a Webster; he. did not have an 
eloquence that could express history, but an 
eloquence that could make it. A Macaulay 
could write a page, but a Beecher could help 
make the Nation that must fill the page. 
He made facts for eloquence to record. 

When this influential manhood began, our 
Kation was divided into two very hostile 
sections. The South had become so alarmed 
regarding its peculiar property that a North- 
ern man having a known love of liberty 
did not dare travel in the South. The 
Northern merchants were so anxious to 
retain the cotton and sugar trade of the 
South that they all frowned upon any 
politics which numbered freedom among its 
ideas, and they would mob or burn a church 
131 



The Message of David Swing 

which contained the disciples of a Christian 
liberty and equality. The students in Dart- 
mouth College mobbed free-soil speakers ; the 
President sympathized with the students. 
Churches, schoolhouses, asylums, and homes 
of coloured people in the North were burned 
to check the spread of hope among the 
Africans in the South. Twelve buildings 
were burned in New York ; one large church 
and many homes in Cincinnati ; forty houses 
and two churches in Philadelphia. Pennsyl- 
vania Hall, built for anti-slavery meetings, 
was burned down, along with its valuable 
library, while Mayor and Council offered no 
protection and no word of sympathy. White 
men were imprisoned in Boston for preach- 
ing Abolitionism. In 1837 a slave had been 
burned to death over a slow fire in St. Louis, 
and for denouncing such atrocity the Pev. 
Elijah P. Lovejoy, of this State [Illinois], was 
mobbed to death. 

It was in such days, reaching from 1830 
to 1860, that the hot oratory of Mr. Beecher 
was fabricated like the bolts of Jupiter in 
the infernal shop of Vulcan. Thence came 
also the equipment of Dr. Cheever, Phillips, 
Parker and Sumner. The age sharpened 
their speech, condensed their style, and 
132 



Henry Ward Beecher 

poin-ed in the heroism and passion which 
make martyrs. Of all these men Mr. Beecher 
was the most visible, because his pulpit 
brouo-ht him each week before the people. 
His logic, his simple style, his illustrations, 
his pathos, his hope, made his words fly 
straight as arrows to the heart. This vast 
plea lor universal freedom was well sustained 
for twenty years, and beginning in our West 
it reached its zenith in England, when, in 
1863, he had to teach the horrors of slavery 
to the nation which had produced Cowper 
and Wilberforce, but had forgotten them. 
He embodied the new genius of the United 
States. He lived in 1840 the life our Nation 
reached thirty years afterwards. Boston 
railways built a mean, plain car for negroes 
to ride in. It was called the " Jim Crow 
car Charles Lennox Redmond, an educated 
coloured man, entertained in England by 
persons of rank and fame, and commissioned 
by O'Connell and Father Mathew to bear 
greetings from liberty in England to liberty 
in America, found on going from Boston to 
Salem, his home, that he must not take a 
good car, but must ride in the " Jim Crow 
car In such a time Mr. Beecher began to 
ask the coloured man to sit on his platform 
133 



The Message of David Swing 

and in his church, and thus the " negro car '* 
was met in equity bj the refuge of the great- 
est pulpit the world possessed. 

In 1835, while Mr. Beecher was looking 
out of his soul window with his powerful 
vision and tender nature, he saw in the 
Charleston Courier a notice of a public sale 
of slaves to satisfy a mortgage held by the 
Presbyterian Theological Seminary of South 
' Carolina ; he read also that the estate of the 
Kev. Dr. Furman was to be sold at auction — 
" the farm, a large theological library, twenty- 
seven negroes, some of them very prime, two 
mules, one horse, and an old wagon." In 
those days the Episcopal Bishop of Yirginia, 
Dr. Meade, had published some sermons to 
slaves. One great thought was that they 
must bear well correction, and even if cor- 
rected when not guilty of the offense, they 
must bear the flogging in meekness and 
assign the whipping to some other transgres- 
sion which had been concealed from these 
masters in the Lord. 

It was high time for religion to reach out 
its hand to the slave. Oh, the joy our hearts 
should all feel that these sad facts are all so 
far back of us that they must be sought for 
in the records of almost forgotten history ! 
134 



Henry Ward Beecher 

The slave block, the whip, and the slave are 
gone from our land forever ! 

Thus, if the new generation would make a 
true estimate of the public man who has just 
died, it must reproduce the scene which sur- 
rounded that preacher when his mind and 
heart were first espousing the cause of man 
and Christ. All wonder will then cease that 
his religion became simply that of Christ, 
and that his style admitted of no obscurity 
and no cowardice. His mind, one of the 
greatest ever made, came to an age which 
asked for simplicity, for logic, for only prac- 
tical doctrine, for infinite sympathy and fear- 
lessness. Mr. Beecher had these things to 
give, and he accepted the call from that 
period. He did not perform all the enlight- 
ened toil of the day, but he performed a 
tremendous work, and now, when his grave is 
made in a I^ation which is a unit, a Nation 
dedicated indeed to Liberty, a Nation whose 
South is pressing on towards industry, wealth, 
and education— a Kepublic whose name is 
now respected by every throne and every 
cottage — that grave ought to catch from the 
whole country mingled flowers and tears. 

These great • years terminated with the 
triumph of freedom. In that long reach of 
135 



The Message of David Swing 

time made long by the fullness of thrilling 
events, this pulpit orator had helped to re- 
model the world's sermon, its gospel and its 
politics. He had made the sermon less me- 
chanical, less dry, less narrow, less mournful, 
more human, more sympathetic, more orna- 
mental, more able to compete with the 
worldly literature of the present. He opened 
up the theology of the past and took out much 
superstition and filled the vacancy with 
reason ; he plucked out sectarianism and 
inserted brotherhood ; he extracted a large 
part of hell and filled the vacancy with 
heaven. If some errors of judgment lie 
scattered over this long life they do not ruin 
the landscape any more than the personal 
errors of General Grant ruined his campaign 
for the salvation of our country, A great 
river always carries some driftwood upon its 
bosom. If Mr. Beecher, in his ardour of logic 
and battle, sometimes went beyond the true 
boundary of doctrinal reform, it matters little, 
for the new pulpit learned from its founder 
the independence of thought which can 
reject as readily as accept. If this Brooklyn 
pulpit pencilled some new outlines of religion 
and of its sermon and drew them grandly, 
the pulpit of to-day must not ask him for all 
136 



Henry Ward Beecher 

the details to be put into the new discourse. 
If he helped make for us a country reaching 
in beauty from one sea to another, we should 
not ask him to plough over fields for us and 
tell us what grains and flowers to plant. 
If heaven sends an architect great enough in 
brain to throw a dome over the vast room 
of St. Peter's, other workmen should be glad 
to gird themselves for the task of putting 
down some nmrble floors under the dome and 
for the task of fastening some marble saints 
to the walls. 

But to recall to-day the many sides of this 
personal force and beauty would consume 
many an hour. His death does not sadden 
us by only its own single, dark shadow, but 
also by its reminder that a great troojJ of these 
mighty ones is marching down into death's 
valley. Mr, Beecher's death seems the death 
of a generation. The Parkers, the Phillipses, 
the Sumners, the Chases, the Lincolns, the 
Grants — freedom's thinkers, freedom's or- 
ators, freedom's poets, freedom's statesmen 
freedom's soldiers — are hurrjdng away from 
our world, and are leaving to new hands 
interests the greatest ever committed to 
mind and heart. There must be a great 
Fatherland to which these citizens repair 
137 



The Message of David Swing 

because they have accomplished their tasks 
in the world. We can survive their loss if 
the new multitude will read their lives, mark 
their motives of action, their high politics, 
their simple but divine religion, and if their 
tombs shall become places where youth shall 
bow in tears and deep thoughtfulness, and as 
at the altars of God make solemn vows of 
lifelong service to mankind. 



138 



YII 
PHILLIPS BROOKS' 

IT would be an act of ingratitude were 
this country to pass in silence the death of 
Phillips Brooks. All our churches lay within 
borders of his bishopric. When, two or 
three years ago, in a loftiness of body which 
was only an emblem of a loftiness of mind, 
this preacher walked down this aisle to join 
you in worship, you all felt as though he 
w^ere an elder brother in your religious 
family, and had come to visit his kin. Many 
of you, when spending a Sunday in the city 
where this modern apostle spoke, went joy- 
fully to hear words which you knew would 
fall like manna from the sky. At last each 
of you seemed to hold some personal interest 
in Phillips Brooks ; and now to-day we must 
all come up to his memory bringing our 
tears. Chosen Bishop of Massachusetts in 
1891, the new title could not make much 
headway against the name of Phillips. In 

' Died January 23, 1893. 
139 



The Message of David Swing 

instances not a few, when the title of 
" Bishop " is conferred upon a preacher, it 
does not take the previous name of the man 
more than a few minutes to get out of the 
w^ay. If large bodies move slowly, the con- 
verse ought to be true and tell us why, often, 
when a common preacher is made Bishop, 
his name as a human being instantly dis- 
appears. In the case of this great friend 
who has bidden us " good-bye," the human 
being could not be easily displaced by any 
office in the gift of the church. As the 
names of Edmund Burke and William Pitt 
and Daniel Webster never needed any decora- 
tion from the catalogue of epithets, thus the 
name of Phillips Brooks did not take kindly 
to any form of prefix or supplement. If the 
peculiar duties of the office could have gone 
without carrying a title with them, the scene 
would have been happier ; but to attempt to 
confer upon Phillips Brooks a title was too 
much like painting the pyramids. 

William Pitt was called the " Great Com- 
moner," not only because he was a member 
of the " House," but because he was by 
nature a dealer in the most universal of ideas 
— those ideas w^hich were good not only for 
royal families but for all mankind. When 
140 



Phillips Brooks 

the Colonies attempted to secure their right 
from the Crown, Mr. Pitt gave his elo- 
quence to the cause of the Colonies, because 
his mind could see the human race more 
easily than it could see the little group of 
grandees with the King at their head. Into 
the mind of Pitt all the human rights which 
had been detected and expressed between the 
Greek period and the time of the Earl of 
Chatham crowded to be reloved and re- 
spoken. As science deals in the universal 
truth about trees or stones or stars, so 
William Pitt dealt in the propositions which 
held true in all lands. 

In the vast empire of religions Phil- 
lips Brooks was the " Great Commoner." 
Whether his mind passed through the pages 
of the Gospel, or read as best it could the 
history of the primitive church, or read the 
confessions of Augustine and saw him pick 
up a psalter or heard him pray for the dead, 
or if he read all over the dogmas and prac- 
tices of the Roman Catholic fathers, he al- 
ways emerged from the study infatuated 
with only those truths and customs which 
seemed most needful to the character and 
salvation of the human multitude. He never 
possessed the power to turn a little incident 
141 



The Message of David Swing 

into a great doctrine. He could not by any 
means mistake a piece of the cross for a 
potency which could heal disease ; nor was he 
able to look upon a lighted candle as playing 
any part in any form of natural or revealed 
religion. He stood at that point where all 
the Christian sects meet. No preacher could 
go to Christ without seeing this brother as 
being in the same path. All denominations 
walked with him and enjoyed a conversation 
which made their hearts burn on the way. 
He was like that lofty arch in Paris towards 
which all the great streets seem to run. 
When we think of the discords which are 
now sounding all through the field of both 
the Catholic and Protestant denominations, 
we must recall Phillips Brooks as the recon- 
ciliation of the Nineteenth Century. 

But no one who loves war can fill the 
office of such a "great commoner." That 
fame must rest on an intellect which is 
wreathed with the garlands of peace. This 
man did not fight the Kitualists or the 
Romanists ; he came forward with the large 
and positive truths of religion and permitted 
all that was false or little to die of neglect. 
His pulpit was so full of light that his people 
forgot to bring candles to the chancel ; the 
142 



Phillips Brooks 

fragrance of the Gospel was so exceeding 
sweet that no acolytes were needed to swing 
smoking censers in front of the holy altar. 
We, too, have sat before him when the light 
was all m his forehead and the incense all in 
his heart. 

In the late generations the Episcopal 
Church has been producing some great men. 
"When the clergy of that denomination in 
England had become remarkable for the ab- 
sence of learning and piety, and remarkable 
for the presence of ignorance, indolence and 
vice ; when few who wore the name of clergy- 
man possessed education enough to compose 
a sermon, and had not piety enough to care 
for the parish whose taxes they consumed, 
the Wesleyan reform spi'ang up. That effort 
was wholly a contempt for a dead sanctuary 
and an ardent longing for a religion like that 
of the Saviour of men. It was a new effort 
to rescue the tomb of Christ from the hand 
of the new infidels. 

Jonathan Swift and Laurence Sterne had 
divided their time between the writings for 
the pulpit and writings for the promotion of 
depravity. Sterne published a few sermons, 
but his literary books were so disreputable 
that the sermons were soon forgotten in the 
143 



The Message of David Swing 

pleasure which the vulgarity of " Tristram 
Shandy " gave to that age. It was the prev- 
alence of such churchmen that compelled 
Wesley to rise up in behalf of a Christian life 
that bade fair to be forgotten. Wesleyism 
did not contemplate a new church ; it was 
an uprising against ecclesiastical infamy. 
Awakened by Wesleyism, the National Epis- 
copacy underwent a great reform and ran 
boldly forward. 

A pulpit paid by national taxes easily falls 
from virtue, and, as often there were paro- 
chial schools where the teacher regularly 
drew a salary from the state but had an 
empty schoolhouse, so there were pulpits 
which gave a living to some man in holy 
orders, who seldom read a service and still 
less frequently wearied himself or an audi- 
ence with a discourse. It is now about fifty 
years since there came to the English Epis- 
copal Church a second great impulse. It 
was not wholly a reform, but it poured into 
that old sanctuary so much new piety and 
enthusiasm that it cannot but be called a 
marked part of a forward movement. It 
passes now in history under any one of 
several names : the " tractarian movement," 
or the '* high-church movement," or the 
144 



Phillips Brooks 

" ritualistic raovement," or " Puseyism." A 
few minds, deeply religious, — men who in the 
Seventeenth Century would have been the 
companions of Fenelon — began to study the 
far-off church of the fathers. They longed 
to rebuild their plundered and razed Jeru- 
salem. In the long reign of vice and neglect 
even the beautiful buildings of Grod had 
become battered ruins. The house was as 
fallen as the heart. 

These men, sons of Oxford, went back in 
history to find that day of splendour at 
which the worship of God began to sink. 
They shovelled away the earth from their 
buried Pompeii and soon found the rich old 
colours upon the long-hidden walls. It was 
a most valuable labour of history and love, 
for out of it came the rebuilding and repair- 
ing of the churches and chapels of England ; 
and came also a living religion which joined 
a pure belief to a holy life. Hundreds of 
millions of dollars soon went into the re- 
building of the houses of religion ; but there 
is no money which can express the new 
Christianity which began at once to re-adorn 
the soul. 

The men who came back from that his- 
toric study, and who joined in this pious 
145 



The Message of David Swing 

renaissance, soon divided into two classes, 
the High church and Low church, the former 
comprising those men who brought back all 
the rites and emblazonry of the earlier times, 
while the Low church became eclectic, and, 
feeling that the present had outgrown the 
emblematic period, asked England to accept 
the simple religion of Jesus and His apostles. 
The High church became enamoured of all 
they discovered and made valuable old atti- 
tudes, old positions, a facing the east, showy 
vestments, priestly offices, candles, incense, 
confessional, and many a genuflection. 

These were the Ritualists, with whom the 
sandal of a Christ was the essential part of 
the Saviour of mankind. The Low church 
became equally enamoured only of that part 
of the Kew Testament which they found in 
the old lava beds, and, making of little moment 
the robes and motions and incense of the re- 
mote yesterday, they espoused a Christianity 
which reached out a kind hand towards the 
sects which had filed down from Calvin and 
Wesley. The High church used its relics for 
building a wall around itself. And thus it 
stands to-day, walled in, and as exclusive as 
though it feared that its friendship might 
escape and be wasted upon a Presbyterian 
146 



Phillips Brooks 

or a Wesleyan, and as though the love of 
God might escape and invade some meeting- 
house which did not make the sign of the 
cross, or might escape and save some infant 
that was dying at midnight without being 
baptized. 

It cannot in reason be charged upon the 
Ritualists that they make religion too ornate. 
Man has not lived in this world long enough 
to enable him to say that any part of life can 
hold too much of real beauty. The temperate 
zone from the Gulf to the St. Lawrence is 
beautiful in June, but it has never dared 
laugh at the more abundant blossomings of 
the tropics. Many of us have had happy 
moments in those sanctuaries where grand 
choral music has marched up and down and 
in and out. 

There may be other minds which love to 
face the east, and other minds which love to 
see incense rising as though it were carrying 
heavenward the burden of human prayers. 
Persons of little or much culture must be 
eclectics in the realm of beauty for the 
church, or the city, or the home. If the 
ritualists feel proud of a pictured religion, 
and ask that many texts of Scripture be ut- 
tered in material emblems, and that the 
147 



The Message of David Swing 

candles of Solomon's Temple reappear in 
the modern house of God, they have a taste 
we are all bound to respect. We concede 
the same right to those Christians who love 
the rite of washing each other's feet. We 
confess sympathy with the ritualism of the 
Salvation Army, which pictures Christ as 
the Captain of their host and which follows 
Paul in the dream of being a good soldier of 
the Lord. Let ritualism appear where it 
may, in the High church, or the Roman 
church, or in the Salvation Army, it must 
pass along as a lawful form and variation of 
human taste. Its harmfulness has of late 
years come from minds, which, instead of 
admiring and enjoying Ritualism, have de- 
scended to the worship of it — the worship of 
such fugitive and unimportant accessories — 
which made it difficult for a Bishop's crown 
to reach a forehead which loved the sublime 
spirituality of Jesus more than it loved the 
fleeting pageantry of perfumes and colours, 
and which loved the face turned towards 
all the sects in their hour of prayer more 
than he loved a genuflection or a face turned 
towards the east. 

In the east we see only the sun, but all 
around this man lay the hopes and griefs of 
148 



Phillips Brooks 

the human soul, more tremendous than a 
thousand suns. If any proof were wanting, 
to show that Kitualism, when idolized, turns 
men who might have been scholars and 
thinkers and orators into half-childish 
natures, busy in the ornaments of an altar, 
like children around the Christmas tree, that 
proof may be read in the diflBlculties which 
lay between Phillips Brooks and the high 
office for which he seemed to have been 
born. In itself. Ritualism may be a lawful 
form of religion, but history shows that it 
may be cultivated until it excludes what it 
once ornamented, and ends by becoming 
only the tropical efflorescence of human 
vanity. A deep attachment to Eitualism 
may be taken as a good-bye bidden by the 
young preacher to the height and depth of 
thought which belongs to the pulpit in all 
the great period of church life. A high 
Eitualism is a most perfect and most alluring 
means for keeping the mind of the clergyman 
within the limits of a perpetual childhood. 
A Ritualist ought to admire his ceremony as 
a man loves flowers — happy when the blos- 
soms are near, but happy also in the barren 
fields of winter or in Sahara's leafless sand. 
If one thinks of the High churchmen and 
149 



The Message of David Swing 

the Low churchmen as visiting the old past 
to find once again the lost church of the 
fathers, one must see the Ritualist entering 
our age, not only bringing much of the 
apostolic doctrine, but also as having his 
arms full of candles, of priestly robes, of 
curtains fastened by " loops of blue each to 
its sister," and full of " badger-skins dyed 
red " ; and the same spectator must see the 
Low churchman coming from that act of ex- 
huming, carrying in his hands the words and 
deeds and life of our Lord. You may all, if 
you wish, admire many a High churchman 
acting in his peculiar office, but for this 
absent Bishop you cannot but cherish a 
greater admiration and a deeper love. He 
reached out his hand to all men, and so sin- 
cere was he that his hand always pointed out 
the path of his heart. 

"When the heart studies the bygone years, 
it ought to esteem great in the past that 
which it wishes to come true in the future. 
We ought to look deeply at the yesterdays 
in order to catch the image of to-morrow. 
And, as the soul of Phillips Brooks longed to 
see a Christian unity and equality, longed to 
see a civilization which should resemble the 
life of the Son of Man, he gathered up from 
150 



Phillips Brooks 

the fathers the doctrines which tended to 
make noble men and to join them into a 
wide brotherhood. The Ritualists seem, by 
some error of locality, to have exhumed the 
Mosaic age ; the Low churchmen seem to 
have laid open to view a more recent arena 
— that of Jesus. 

In his wanderings in the old religious 
world, this lamented mortal recalls that 
Dante who, in his great dream, drew near a 
holy mountain, which lifted up its form not 
far from the Paradise of his God. The 
devout wanderer did not see any candles or 
vestments or studied posturing ; he saw no 
"apostolic succession." The world around 
him was too great to be in harmony with the 
rites and emblems of some fleeting year. 
One by one the angels came over him, but 
each one was chanting some benediction 
which had once fallen from the lips of the 
Master. No sooner had the words sounded, 
"Blessed are the pure in heart," than on 
came some other winged choristers saying, 
"Blessed are the merciful." To the same 
Italian worshipper at last a great chorus 
chanted the Lord's Prayer, all amplified like 
a tune in music which breaks up into four 
parts: 

151 



The Message of David Swing 

" Oh, Thou Almighty Father ! Who closfe make 
The heavens Thy dwelliug, not in bounds confined, 
But that with love iutenser there Thou viewest 
Thy primal effluence, hallowed be Thy name ! 
Join each created being to extol 
Thy might, for worthy humblest thanks and praise 
Is Thy blessed Spirit. May the Kingdom's peace 
Come unto us, for we, unless it come, 
"With all our striving thither tend in vain." 

These are the words which our great 
American " Commoner " heard chanted in 
the lofty cathedrals of the past, and these 
are the words he wished to hear sounding in 
the greater aisles and corridors of the future. 
He extracted greatness from the past because 
he wished history to be only another name 
for his soul's hope. His mind conceived of a 
service and an anthem too great to be read 
or sung by his limited sect. His ritual must 
include a hundred Books of Common Prayer ; 
his vestments must include the robes of a 
Louis XIV, the habit of an exiled Quaker, 
and the seamless coat of Jesus. He found 
his universal and perpetual harmony in the 
words : " Blessed are the pure in heart." 

If you would find a reason for the con- 
fessed eloquence of this eminent Christian, 
you must begin by studying the advantage 
found in a mind which loved the whole hu- 
152 



Phillips Brooks 

man family, and then loved all the great 
truths which hold the people's happiness. 
Eloquence is the utterance of great truths in 
a manner worthy of the truths. But there 
can be no such utterance without passion. 
This man was capable of loving even the 
negro slave. When those old days of trial 
were brooding over the Nation, Phillips 
Brooks flamed up on the slaves' side. After 
the slaves were free he travelled a thousand 
miles to plead in this city for the cause of 
the education and full citizenship of those 
homeless Africans. Only a little group of 
our citizens appeared in the large hall, for 
the orator was young in his fame and the 
city was young in its power to appreciate 
such an appeal from heart to heart. None 
the less did the speech run like molten iron 
from a furnace, thus teaching us who listened 
that oratory is great truth uttered with great 
passion. Gesture and tone are insignificant. 
It is necessary for this truth and passion 
to enjoy the noble accessories of language 
and style. It is difficult for a great mind, 
great heart, great language, and good style, 
all to meet in one human being. The dis- 
tance between orators is therefore very great. 
Only a few come to us each hundred years. 
153 



The Message of David Swing 

In Bishop Brooks, all these ingredients 
mingled. He had by nature and by study 
mastered the one language of his race. It 
became at last the hundred gates of his soul's 
Thebes. At these portals the riches of his 
age passed in and out. He used no dead 
words, no old, Avorn-out phrases, at which 
the brain of the listener sinks to sleep. His 
words were all alive, and they came singing 
like the string and arrows of the wonderful 
bow of Ulysses. His words came too rapidly 
indeed, but his ideas were instantly seen and 
instantly felt to be true. Each word was 
distinct, like a single note in some rapid 
melody, an inseparable part of a beautiful 
song. 

What a simplicity there is in all such high 
speech ! because the theme is so large and so 
absorbing that it shames away the most of 
artifice, and makes the little art of the piece 
wholly invisible. If those final words as- 
cribed to the Bishop were indeed spoken, his 
mind was not greatly under a cloud, for the 
simple sentence v/hispered to a servant : 
" You need not care for me longer ; I am go- 
ing home," is made of the kind of words 
which earth needs when it is fading, and 
which the final home asks for when it is 
154 



Phillips Brooks 

opening its gates to a noble spirit, once a 
pilgrim here. Death always asks for simple 
language, because its mystery and sadness 
and hope are all the ornamentation the 
speaker or listener can bear. Ah ! sad loss 
such a being to all the churches of our coun- 
try ! He was a man so symmetrical and so 
fitted to all the hours and need of our land 
that the office of bishop went to him, not to 
add anything to his fame or power, but to 
be itself honoured and exalted. It was the 
office that went to be crowned. As an Epis- 
copal bishop he was much less than as the 
great, free orator of the Christian philosophy. 
But the terms " bishop " and " commoner " 
are both made sacred now by the sudden ad- 
vent of death. 

It is certain that this name will long re- 
main the centre of a magic power. The 
Baptist, with his close communion, cannot 
but be impressed with that scene of brother- 
hood Vv^hich lies so outspread in this church- 
man's life ; the Unitarians can also look 
towards Phillips Brooks, to know hovr 
rationalism of a high school may be joined 
to the most marked spirituality and piety ; 
the restless and debating Presbyterians may 
study him, to learn what peace and useful- 
155 



The Message of David Swing 

ness they can find in a Christianity many 
times simpler than their Confession of Faith ; 
to him may the Low church look for per- 
petual vindication ; and to him should all the 
young ritualistic clergy turn, not to abandon 
their pictured and highly coloured worships, 
but to mark how the pulpit of a Christian 
teacher and thinker towers above the swing- 
ing of censers and the adjustment of robes 
and the graceful bowing of the body in its 
acts of devotion. He should warn them 
against the folly of a half- wasted life. 

"While we are thus standing by such a 
grave, the inquiry comes from many whether 
Ritualism and Romanism are to displace the 
simpler churches and come into almost 
despotic power. Of this result there seems 
little probability. The Broad church is 
young, but Ritualism is as old as the world. 
It ruled in the Mosaic age. It ruled in 
India, Egypt, and in all great nations before 
the Son of Man came, and then entering 
Christianity it filled with its pageant all 
temples up to the days of Luther. 

The Broad church has been in the world 

only half a century. In that brief period 

what master minds it has produced ! It is 

nothing else than the old Christianity of 

156 



Phillips Brooks 

rites and doctrines smitten by the deeper 
thought of these later generations. That 
reason which has created the modern world 
will most surely drive religion towards a 
holy life, a simple piety and a wide brother- 
hood. Komanism will be smitten by the 
same hand, and one by one shall fall from it 
the follies and vices which that Church 
gathered up by passing through the middle 
centuries of ignorance and sin. That new 
thought, which has transformed despotisms 
into republics and slaves into the citizens of 
England and France, will not spare the old 
life and ideas of the temple of prayer. The 
antiquity of Komanism and Kitualism will 
not protect them. Many things thousands 
of years old have died in this century. It is 
the great graveyard of antiquity and the 
beautifully draped cradle of a new youth. 

When it is said that reason will smite the 
old churches, it is not meant that any violence 
will come. Heaven keep violence far away 
from all those Koman and Protestant altars 
where our parents said their prayers ! Reason 
will smite them only as it smote the valley 
of the Mississippi and covered it with civi- 
lization ; smite them only as the sun smites 
the fields in April and makes them bloom ; 
157 



The Message of David Swing 

smite them as reason touched Phillips Brooks 
when he was young and made his heart 
warm with love and his forehead white with 
pure truth. 



158 



VIII 
DECORATION DAY 

TO-MORROW the gi'aves of the soldiers 
are to be decorated by the hands of 
memory and esteem. Many thousand per- 
sons will pay thus the tribute of personal 
love. Many a mother wiU visit the spot 
where her son sleeps; many a man and a 
woman, now in middle life, will visit the 
grave where their father rests. He marched 
to war when they were little children. They 
remember some noise of drums and some sad 
parting ; they remember the body came back 
and that the neighbours met to hold a funeral 
service. To-morrow old letters will be re- 
read and old photographs restudied with 
many a tear. 

A few days before the battle of Stone 
River a young husband, a colonel of cavalry, 
left Cincinnati in haste, to resume his place 
with his troopers. He foresaw a great battle. 
He wrote a good-bye note to his wife, saying 
that ' a great battle was near ; he might fall ; 
159 



The Message of David Swing 

she must not wear mourniug ; she must plant 
some vines by his grave, and go on as though 
in the world of a great and kind God.' In 
a few days that awful meeting of armies 
came, and this colonel was among the slain. 
Thus tens of thousands of graves will to- 
morrow be visited by hearts full of an affec- 
tion which no years can abate. Many will 
say : Here my father sleeps ; here my brother, 
here my cousin, here my classmate, turns to 
dust. But as that generation of weepers 
will soon all be silent as the soldiers, will 
soon overtake them in the great halting- 
place, this Decoration Day will soon rest upon 
the gratitude which a ISTation owes to its de- 
fenders and upon the admiration all noble 
minds cherish for men who were heroic 
enough to imperil their life for their country. 
Each soldier's monument in the cities and 
cemeteries of the land will be decorated to- 
morrow ; not in the name of personal friend- 
ship only, but also in the name of that intel- 
ligence and self-denial which could fight and 
die for the welfare of society. Even when 
the public shall not know even the names of 
the entombed soldiers it will cast down its 
offerings to their virtues. 
It adds much to the beauty of to-morrow 
i6o 



Decoration Day 

that all the wars of our Nation have been 
honourable. Exception must be made in the 
case of the war with Mexico in 1846. That 
conflict with a neighbour was brought about 
by the Southern clamour for more slave 
territory. Texas must be annexed with or 
without the consent of Mexico. The Union 
would at once be dissolved unless the South 
were granted this new era. With a view to 
such annexation, Mr. Polk, of Tennessee, was 
elected President and soon came annexation 
and war. The other struggles— that of 
17Y6, of 1812 and of 1861— were founded 
upon great principles of right, and they 
stand in history all ennobled by the calmest 
thought, truth and honour. Out of these 
three struggles our Nation extracted those 
principles and that power which make it at 
last such a home for so many millions. 
Whoever will to-day make a survey of this 
Nation and mark the blessings and oppor- 
tunities it confers upon its citizens will not 
fail to whisper his gratitude to all those men 
who gave up their lives in those fields of 
battle. 

Those dark days which came between 
1860 and 1865 . were gloomy beyond the 
realization of any of those who were then 
i6i 



The Message of David Swing 

children. The loyal States were full of all 
the sorrows which wars entail. Values were 
all unsettled, literature, education, and all 
art had come to a halt. The heart was full 
of depression lest England might join in the 
Confederacy. 

Defeats, carnage, blunders, great expense, 
new calls for troops, mourning in all cities 
and villages found a procession of ideas as 
gloomy as the ideal march of death. Thou- 
sands of the noblest men in the North were 
so depressed by the awful surroundings that 
they said to each other in private : " Perhaps 
it would have been better to let the slave 
States withdraw in peace." The outcome of 
war was as much hidden in 1862 as it was in 
1776. However patriotic and brave a man 
may be, his heart can easily become the 
victim of doubts. It is easy now for our 
young generation to look back upon the last 
war and see it as only a long march of an 
invincible army. An army led by men who 
did not know defeat and who had little to 
do except shout ' victory behind a running 
enemy. So Franklin in later life could look 
back with pleasure to the time when he was 
poor and homeless, but it was not in his 
power when he had only the loaf of bread to 
162 



Decoration Day- 
look forward with much of romantic poetry. 
Thus our new millions can look back upon 
the war of the Union and see a fine procession 
of statesmen marching towards universal 
liberty, but those who marched and those 
who led thirty years ago could not gaze upon 
any such a scene, there being a thick, black 
curtain between them and the future. 

There was in the North and in Canada a 
party formed in the name of a disgraceful 
peace. They talked of conventions of the 
Middle States ; talked of a new separate West, 
and never used any language about the 
Union except that of despair. These men 
once sent word from Canada to Mr. Lincoln 
that they were empowered to negotiate a 
peace. Patriots feared that there would be a 
guerilla conflict for twenty years. The sud- 
denness with which the war at last ended, the 
sudden acceptance of the defeat by the entire 
South came to the whole world as a great 
surprise. The soldiers whose names we are 
to honour not only fought for their country, 
but they fought, suffered, and died amid 
great gloom. They could not see a final 
perfect triumph — they could only toil and 
hope. To suffer, to be wounded, to die on 
the eve of an assured victory might be a 
163 



The Message of David Swing 

form of blessedness ; but heavy were the 
hearts which had to endure agony without 
being able to read the future of the contest. 

A Greek orator who had to speak at Athens 
after a very disastrous battle said that the 
true soldier never dies defeated, for, go as 
the battle may, there is victory always in his 
soul. It must have been thus with the de- 
fenders of our Union. They must have been 
so full of the sense of right and duty that in 
prison or in the hospital or dying on the field, 
their minds must have been filled with 
triumph. In one of the darkest hours of 
the whole strife those disunionists who had 
assembled in Canada asked permission to 
come to Washington and submit to the 
President some terms of peace. Mr. Lincoln 
sent word that he would give them an audi- 
ence only in case their plans involved the 
restoration of the Union and the abolition of 
slavery ; there could be no peace on any other 
terms. Thus with Mr. Lincoln, however 
dark the battle-field, there was always a 
victory in his heart. 

It must have been thus with the rank and 

file in their last hour. Sinking away upon 

the bloody field, while their eyes were taking 

a last look at the picture of wife and child 

164 



Decoration Day 

or father or mother, those noble men must 
have felt within the triumph of the most 
divine right. The cause was one of the 
greatest for which arms ever clashed. 

The Greeks and Romans often made war 
only through vanity, or else that they might 
plunder a rich neighbour. Napoleon marched 
600,000 men against Moscow only because 
the Czar of Russia would not close the Russian 
harbour to English ships. Here in America 
the contest was for the preservation of the 
best nation ever founded in the whole history 
of man, a nation whose principles had been 
selected from the wisdom of all ages and 
Avhich had been made into a State by the 
wisest and best of all men, principles which 
for nearly a hundred years had brought to 
millions of citizens the most possible of pros- 
perity and happiness. 

But this Nation so famous for its men and 
ideas contained one dark spot. It contained 
a blemish which France, Germany, England 
and Russia would not permit to soil their fame. 
At last the hour came in which the question 
must be settled whether the blemish must be 
continued and the Nation destroyed, or 
whether the Nation should be preserved and 
the spot erased. Thus came a war not of 
165 



The Message of David Swing 

vanity or conquest, but a struggle to save 
the wisdom of ages. By a singular mental 
misfortmie there was a group of Confederate 
citizens who loved slavery more than they 
loved freedom ; they had reached the singular 
wisdom which could love the spots on the sun 
more than they loved the sun, loved the 
worm in a rose more than they loved the 
rose itself. 

"When it is remembered that under the war 
lay such a noble groundwork of right and 
truth it ought not to be difficult for us to 
feel that our Nation's dead died in peace, 
even on the fields of defeat ; it ought not to 
be difficult for us to cast flowers upon their 
tombs. We ought to feel that no soul can be 
prolific enough in blossoms to equal the moral 
excellence of the day. 

All the happiness, all the success, all the 
splendour of the present combine to enhance 
the honour of the soldier's grave. The mind 
can easily make here and now a picture of 
certain beautiful forms going forth to-mor- 
row to honour the patriotic dead. The form 
of Religion happy in her new truth and new 
morality ; the form of Politics, set free from 
an old wrong ; Education widened and en- 
riched ; Art quickened and exalted ; Litera- 
i66 



Decoration Dav 

ture newly inspired ; the South awakened to 
personal industry and full of new dreams ; 
the South and North holding hands in friend- 
ship ; — these graceful figures can be seen as 
hovering like blest angels over the soldiers' 
dust and saying in simple gratitude, " Soldier 
of the Nation, we thank thee with full 
heart." 

All the prosperous cities and towns which 
are now redeeming the South, the growing 
unity of language, literature, social life and 
political doctrine and sentiment, come to us 
from those battle-fields whose memory re- 
turns in each May. It would have been 
more in harmony with all religion and all 
philosophy could the establishment of the 
Union and the abolition of slavery have 
come by peaceful ways and means, but since 
this was impossible, unable now to amend 
the past, we must go back to all those bloody 
grounds and bless them that, out of such suf- 
ferings, they grew for an age so many 
flowers. In the name of a noble Nation, all 
united from Gulf to Lake and from sea to sea, 
in the name of the advance of all that is 
good, in the name of inventions, discoveries, 
sciences, arts, a happier womanhood, a hap- 
pier childhood, a nobler manhood, we this 
167 



The Message of David Swing 

clay declare fragrant and precious all those 
flowers which send their roots down into our 
soldiers' dust. The events which have fol- 
loAved the dreadful war have justified its 
years of deep sorrow. The bitterness has 
all passed, the days of peace have come. 

ISTo one who attempts to-day to speak in 
the name of both religion and the soldier 
Avill dare pass by the fact that the African, 
although free from the chains of a slave, is 
still the victim of a wide-spread injustice. 
He is still too often treated as an animal not 
worthy of human rights. Against the con- 
tinuance of the old slave-driving theory, all 
honourable men, white and black, must 
think and act ; but at the same time our col- 
oured citizens must give the South credit for 
having made a very great progress in its 
opinions and conduct. A new era is coming, 
but all men must lament that it comes in 
slowly. 

Our public men are simply the creatures 
of the age. Our Presidents move very 
slowly for fear they may walk away from 
that ballot-box which is to contain the war- 
rant of a second term. Our only hope lies 
in such an awakening of the people as shall 
at last make justice to the African citizen a 
l68 



Decoration Day 

matter of life and death to the men who 
want high office. We must make opinions 
for years and years before we can make 
great statesmen. 

The "second term" must be abolished, 
and then must come one more reform, that 
of making to a common, scheming, soulless 
politician even a first term impossible. A 
President of such a Nation ought not to be a 
tame follower of old, beaten political paths. 
He ought to be a humane man, a lover of 
even the poor ; capable like Christ of bless- 
ing the multitude with new beatitudes 
straight from heaven. Since Mr. Lincoln 
there has been no president who revealed 
any marked humane sentiments. Exception 
may well be made in the person of President 
Hayes. He did what he could for the free- 
dom of the South. He would have done 
more had not his term been full of the 
troubles which were yet strong and fresh 
from the war of the rebellion. But with 
Mr, Hayes humanity disappeared. However 
great in many particulars the Presidents may 
have been, no one of them has been visibly 
affected by the fact that the negro in the 
South cannot vote in safety and is liable any 
day to be imprisoned, whipped, hanged, or 
169 



The Message of David Swing 

burned. Had Henry Bergh been President 
in any one of the late Presidential periods, 
he would have found some means of check- 
ing that cruelty which so shames our civili- 
zation. But literature, the daily press, the 
pulpit, all good men and women, North and 
South, will have to be active some years yet 
before a refined civilization, one of love and 
justice, will be able to trample to dust that 
stereotyped soul, the calculating political 
character, which is so utterly and forever 
heartless. 

The same slow progress which gave the 
African liberty must go ouAvard and clothe 
him with every form of human right. The 
soldiers whose graves are so sacred must be 
ornamented not only by floral offerings but 
also by the ever-growing happiness of the 
whole people. Our troops did not fight and 
die for these May lilies, roses and laurels, 
but they did for humanity, and their most 
worthy Decoration Day will come in only 
that spring v/hich shall say to their disem- 
bodied souls : " Every human being in the 
Union is living in the fullness of confessed 
and secured right." 

Towards such a noble result we must all 
struggle with daily industry and with daily 
170 



Decoration Day 

hope. As the churches are now attempting 
to get Calvinism out of their creeds, and are 
no longer willing to disgrace the Deity by 
making Him select a few men for happiness 
and doom others to wrath, so must we elimi- 
nate such a philosophy from the Nation and 
save it from the disgrace of electing white 
men to mercy and dooming black men to the 
jail and rope and malicious fire. Let not 
those at least rail at Calvinism who conduct 
a Nation in the name of a most infamous 
reprobation. 

The right has this fact to encourage it — 
that the American public has always sooner 
or later made its moral force felt in law and 
conduct. Its words of truth and pleadings 
have never been lost. The daily press, the 
magazines and reviews, the graver literature, 
the schoolhouse, the pulpit, have always 
compelled the darkness to flee and light to 
come. These voices can once more penetrate 
the clouds and usher in a happier day to 
souls that have been wronged for three hun- 
dred years. If not many years ago there 
was a vast multitude of persons who died on 
bloody fields for human rights and happiness, 
is there not now living a still more numerous 
army who will live in flowery states, in a 
171 



The Message of David Swing 

blossoming world, for an advance of the 
same right and happiness ? Will you not 
all live for principles for which your brothers 
died? The South is herself beginning to 
speak and act in behalf of the rights of the 
African. Such wise words and deeds are 
worthy of being reprinted all through the 
land and of being expanded into full elo- 
quence. 

Let us pass from this plea for the African 
and take one more view of the soldier's 
grave. Each year lessens the discord be- 
tween the North and South and increases 
the harmony. "What our country now needs 
is not a host of recriminating historians, but 
a host of brotherly souls bound up in a new 
future. Never was adequate justice done the 
judgment and feelings of Charles Sumner 
when, soon after the close of the rebellion, 
he moved in the Senate that " no name of 
any battle-field of the war be placed upon 
the Nation's flag and that the Capitol should 
contain on its walls no picture of a battle in 
which citizens fought citizens." The mo- 
tion was ridiculed by many Northern Sena- 
tors and editors of that day, but the lapse of 
years has shown the idea just and beautiful. 
No American ever surpassed Charles Sumner 
172 



Decoration Day 

in the conception and defense of human 
rights, but he was incapable of worshipping 
war between brothers. He gladly washed 
all such battle pictures from his remem- 
brance. His spirit ought to become rapidly 
the spirit of our Nation in its entire extent. 
Hate must be transient, love eternal. 

That breadth of mind and soul which made 
Charles Sumner so impressive is moving over 
the South and is liable to adorn that warm 
heart whose love and philosophy were re- 
pressed by the presence and use of human 
bondage. There remains nothing to prevent 
a oneness of idea from prevailing between 
Chicago and Memphis and Atlanta. 

A Confederate officer in an essay contrib- 
uted recently to a literary magazine of Dallas, 
Texas, having summed up his sad memories 
of the war, adds these words : " Peace and 
happiness reign supreme over a free people. 
Our hearts are great enough to love our 
whole country, North and South, mountain, 
river and plain. The gulf breezes waft soft 
messages from orange bowers to Northern 
hills and apple blossoms. . . . We are all 
Americans. We are all patriots. Thus let 
it be forever." Thus this brilliant essay of 
J. K. Cole reveals the fact that the graves of 
173 



The Message of David Swing 

the soldiers imply a national unity of princi- 
ples and a wide-spread oneness of heart. 
Many years ago the words " impending 
crisis " and " irrepressible conflict " were 
upon the lips of all statesmen. How could 
slavery and liberty dwell in the same house ? 
All w^e need know to-day is that the land is 
full of soldiers' graves and those words are 
gone. There is no " impending crisis," the 
"irrepressible conflict" has passed av/ay. 
The blood of our brothers has purchased the 
unity and happiness of a great people. One 
justice, one truth, one duty, one hope, are 
slowly advancing as though like morning 
sunbeams they were anxious to flood all 
fields with one light. 

"When to-morrow you shall look at monu- 
ments and graves of the known and the 
nameless dead, tears ought to fill your eyes 
at the thought of the thirty years in which 
those hearts have been absent from the 
scenery and experience of this life. On 
your account they are absent from your 
world. But such tears meet the demand 
"which the soldier's tomb makes upon the 
soul of every living citizen. When Pericles 
attempted to comfort the Athenians at the 
graves of their soldiers he told them that at 
174 



Decoration Day- 
best ' earth was the sepulchre of a vast mul- 
titude of illustrious men. It was only a large 
grave.' But this is the comfort of an iron- 
like fate. It is not adequate to our greater 
age. We need a richer philosophy. We 
must say that through these scattered hill- 
ocks, with theu' May ornaments of grass and 
garlands, there comes to us the voice of God 
and man, earth and sky saying, Catch from 
these braves their spirit ; take up the banners 
of truth their dying hands let fall ; as they 
made a greater nation, so go ye on to make 
the grander Republic a greater art, a greater 
learning, a greater justice, a greater friend- 
ship, a greater religion. The souls of the 
soldiers are not in these graves. They are 
far away on diviner heights. So those who 
to-morrow shall strew lilies must at once 
turn away from those heaps of dust and look 
up towards nobler heights in religion and in 
all the blessed forms of love and righteous- 
ness. Such death must be the inspiration of 
life. 



175 



IX 

THE DUTY OF THE PULPIT 

In the Hour of Social Unrest 

IT would be a happiness to all of us, could 
we meet to-day having in our hands 
branches from the woods or shells from the 
shore where Ave may have recently attempted 
to find pleasure and rest : but the events of 
the last few months, and the gloom of the 
future, have stolen from prairie and seacoast ' 
their long-found charm. 

The trees and the waters have for many 
weeks past sighed over the infirmities of our 
country. 

To find the images of greatness, we have 
been compelled to look into the past. When 
President Cleveland intervened, and, per- 
haps, saved this city from being plundered 
and burned, some men feared to thank him 
for such a quick intervention. July must 
deal very gently with criminals who are to 
vote in November, 

176 



The Duty of the Pulpit 

Not since 1861 has the sky been as dark 
as it is to-day.' We have unconsciously built 
up within this generation two black passions 
— the one, the feeling that money is the only 
thing worth living for, and the other, that 
work must hate capital. Thus the level of 
all society is lowered — the monej^ed class by 
its worship of gold, the other class by its life 
of hate. While ^vealth has inflamed its pos- 
sessors and worshippers, there has lived and 
talked an army of angry orators, whose pur- 
pose has been to make the men who work in 
the vineyard hate the men who pay them at 
nightfall. In such circumstances, the vine- 
yard will soon be, first, a battle-field, and 
then, a desert. 

It would seem that all the Christian clergy, 
Catholic and Protestant, and all the ethical 
teachers should, this autumn, enter into a 
new friendship with these two discordant 
classes, and preach to both alike the gospel 
of a high humanity. The churches and 
pulpits of all grades possess a vast influence. 
They do not hold any " key to the situation," 
or any " balance of power " ; they cannot 
open and close the gates of the earthly 
heaven and hell for America ; but they 

» September, 1894. 
177 



The Message of David Swing 

possess an enormous moral force — a po\Yer 
that should no longer be exhausted upon 
little theological issues and practices. All 
the intellectual and spiritual resources of the 
pulpit should be exhausted in the effort to 
advance human character. Society needs 
speedy and large additions to both its right- 
eousness and its common sense. 

What saved the country from a great 
calamity last July was the fact that the 
schoolhouse, the church, and the press, of 
the last fifty years had quietly created an in- 
telligence large enough to stand between the 
people and their ruin. When the new kind 
of autocrat ordered all the railway wheels 
between the two oceans to stop, and had 
sat down to enjoy the silence of locomotives 
and iron rails, there were so many noble and 
educated men in the railway service that the 
voice of the autocrat was the only noise that 
died out. It was not President Cleveland 
alone that came between us and a great 
calamity. He was aided by the high com- 
mon sense of a large majority of the railway 
employees. The railway union of working 
men was not formed for a career of mingled 
cruelty and nonsense, but that men might 
help each other in honourable ways and in 
178 



The Duty of the Pulpit 

hours of great wrong and need. The union 
was not formed in order that railway men 
might become beggars, at a time when 
their work was bringing almost a barrel 
of flour a day for each family. With wages 
at two dollars a day and wheat at half a 
dollar a bushel, the strike and trouble of 
July were not only unreasonable but ma- 
licious. 

Nearly all clergymen stand close to the 
people. They are reared in the philosophy 
that gives bread to the hungry. The gospel 
of Christ is one of infinite sympathy. Men 
who from choice enter the ministry of the 
Judaean religion are never so happy as when 
they see the labourer sit down under a good 
roof to a table spread with abundant food. 
In the life of the average clergyman, a large 
part of his thought and public utterance, 
and actual labour and sympathy, is given to 
what is called the common people. The 
upper classes need little. There is nothing 
in the millionaire that appeals to the heart. 
The rich are so self-adequate that they may 
draw admiration and esteem, but not sym- 
pathy. The heart of the pulpit is freely 
given to the middle and lower classes. In 
all time, the common people have attracted 
179 



The Message of David Swing 

to themselves the most of both philosophy 
and poetry, but the attention and the affec- 
tion they won in the former times seem 
weak, compared with the love that has been 
flung to them in the passing century. Under 
the influence of this sympathetic philosophy, 
wages have been advanced, humane laws 
have been passed, the facts of health and 
disease have been studied, and new action 
has come with new light ; and when into 
such an age of both inquiry and action there 
is projected such a scene as that of last July, 
the spectacle does not belong to reason or 
humanity, but only to despotic ignorance and 
m will. 

Labour may, and even must, organize ; but 
the labourers must organize as just and law- 
abiding men, country-loving men, and not as 
bandits. The depressing memory of last 
July is not to be found in the fact that 
labour was organized, or wholly in the fact 
that it " struck." The strike was, indeed, per- 
fectly destitute of common sense, but the 
chief disgrace of the hour lay in the willing- 
ness of free men to obey a central despot and 
join in such acts of wrong and violence as 
would have disgraced savages. Benevolence 
is humiliated that it must feed and clothe 
1 80 



The Duty of the Pulpit 

men who will break the skull or kick to 
insensibility the brother who wishes to earn 
bread for his hungry family. 

It was discovered last July that some of 
thejabour unions employ fighting men to go 
to and fro to hunt up and knock down those 
who do not join in the folly — those who are 
satisfied with their wages or who must work. 
Not every workman is a trained pugilist. 
So men are hired to spend the day or the 
week in pounding men who are noble and 
industrious. The cry " I am an American " 
does not avail as much in Chicago as the 
words "I am a Roman " availed Paul in 
Jerusalem. When Paul said he was a Roman, 
the mob fell back ; but when Mr. Cleveland 
said, "These pounded men are Americans," 
it was thought by some that he was not the 
proper person to make the remark. And yet 
our pulpits have, for fifty years, been trying 
to make Christians, and our schools and 
printing-presses have been trying to endow 
these Christians with sense. 

Quite a number of clergymen have banded 
together to preach the gospel of personal 
righteousness ; that Christianity is Christ in 
human life, Christ in society, Christ in money, 
and Christ in work. We preachers must all 
l8i 



The Message of David Swing 

come to that definition of the church. This 
height of thought will make all dizzy for a 
time ; but the quality of our old Christianity 
will not meet the demands of a republic. A 
despotism may be sustained by Catholics or 
Protestants, but a republic must be sustained 
by men. 

Labour guilds are as old as work and 
capital ; but one kind of labour guild is new, 
and let us all pray that it shall not live to 
become old. In the darkness of the Four- 
teenth Century, the young working man 
looked happily forward to the day when 
he could be admitted into the guild of his 
craft. His mother and sisters looked after 
his habits, that his character might be above 
reproach. The approach to the initiation 
day was much like a youth's approach to his 
first communion. New clothes, a feast, new 
conduct, new inspiration, new hopes came 
with the hour that placed this new name 
upon the noble roll. But this was in the 
dark ages. In the close of the ]^ineteenth 
Century, when the heavens and earth are 
ablaze with the light of Christ, when love 
for man is written everywhere in letters of 
gold, when congresses of religion meet to 
teach us that all men are brethren, then the 
182 



The Duty of the Pulpit 

men who join a guild shake a bludgeon at 
their brother and are advised by a reckless 
king to buy a gun. Some men call this 
phenomenon a commercial disturbance. It 
is nothing of the kind. In the South Sea' 
Islands it is barbarism ; among the carnivo- 
rous animals it is called ferocity; in our 
civilized land it is infamy. 

It seems evident that Christianity asks 
labourers to be organized into societies. If 
a church may be organized that Christians 
may help each other and confer with each 
other about all things that pertain to the 
church, why may not carpenters and railway 
men form a union that many minds and 
many hearts may find what is best for the 
toilers in their field ? The word " Church " 
means a gathering of people, and if the 
exigencies of religion may demand an as- 
sembly, so may the exigencies of a trade. 
But none of these assemblages can sustain 
any relations whatever to violence or any 
kind of interference with the liberty or 
rights of man. For a vast group of railway 
men to sign away their personal liberty and 
permit some one man to order them around 
as though slaves, is a spectacle pitiful to look 
upon ; but to band together for interference 
183 



The Message of David Swing 

with the rights of man is, not a mental 
weakness, but a crime. 

It is a great task for a labour guild to 
study and fully learn what are the facts and 
the needs of itself. Before men quit their 
employers, they should all know the reason 
of the move. After men have been idle for 
a Avinter and have come to regular work and 
regular pay, if they hasten to strike, their 
reason ought to be so large that the whole 
world can see it. But we do things differ- 
ently in enlightened America. Our men 
hasten to throw down tools and their wages, 
and, at last, when starving, they ask some 
committee to make a microscopical search for 
the reason of the distress. And, before this 
reason is known, eminent men express them- 
selves as in full sympathy with it. All the 
railway wheels in America were ordered to 
stop out of sympathy with a reason which a 
committee was looking for with a micro- 
scope. The railways were giving work to 
four millions of people. This work was all 
" called off " by a man with some telegraphic 
blanks, and the poor families supported by 
the T^orth western Railroad lost two hundred 
thousand dollars, the workmen of the Illinois 
Central one hundred and sixty-four thousand 
J 84 



The Duty of the Pulpit 

dollars, of the Milwaukee and St. Paul one 
hundred and seventy-five thousand dollars, 
and thus on to the millions — all which loss 
was ordered from sympathy with men Avho 
were getting each six hundred dollars a year. 

Labour unions will waste their work by the 
millions of dollars' Avorth, and will soil their 
name and ruin the sympathy of literature, 
art and religion, as long as they trust their 
cause to hot-headed, ignorant, illogical men. 
Labour should have for its chieftains our 
Franklins or our John Stuart Mills. These 
should be its guide. If our land possesses no 
such minds, then are we on the eve of untold 
misfortune. When labour shall have Frank- 
lins for its walking delegates, it will enter 
upon a new career. Capital will confer with 
it, congresses of working men will meet, and 
men will find the wages of each toiler and of 
each new period ; but nothing can be done 
by a foolish despot with a club. Yes, some- 
thmg can be done — the Republic can be 
hopelessly ruined through a ruined manhood. 

The wages and whole welfare of the 
labouring man have been much advanced in 
twenty-five years, but the gun and club have 
taken no part in this progress. Conference, 
thought, reason, benevolence, have accom- 
185 



The Message of David Swing 

plislied the blessed task, and they will do much 
more when they are invited to help our race. 
Moral power makes laws. It shames the 
guilty. It dissolves adamant. It founded the 
Christian Church. It has civilized whole 
races ; it has emancipated the mind ; it has 
freed slaves. 

It may easily be remembered that a London 
man a few years ago unveiled the wrongs 
inflicted upon poor young girls. This in- 
justice did not need to be examined by a 
microscope. The heart of London became 
aflame with indignation. The Archbishop 
of Canterbury, and the Archbishop of West- 
minster, Cardinal Manning, the Bishop of 
London, Sir William Harcourt, and Sir 
Robert Cross, flung their minds and hearts 
into the cause, and the Parliament passed a 
new law for a longer and diviner protection 
of girls. 

To many labour unions all talk of moral 
power carries the weight of only nonsense. 
The moral influence theory is indeed defect- 
ive, but it is the only one within human 
reach. If a dozen men should resolve that 
they have rights to seats in a street car, their 
theory seems good ; but, on getting into one 
of these vehicles, if they find the seats all 
1 86 



The Duty of the Pulpit 

taken, unless they can club those persons 
out of those seats, the theory of those dozen 
unionists is very defective. When a man re- 
solves that he ought to sit down and then 
stands up, his resolution is defective. But 
what makes it defective ? The rights of the 
man who is sitting down. So when a set of 
men resolve that they will work only for 
four dollars a day, they hold an imperfect 
platform, because of the rights of the men 
who will work for three dollars. Should a 
clergyman resign his pulpit because his people 
will not pay him six thousand dollars a year, 
his theory is incomplete indeed, unless he can 
kill the preachers who will come for five 
thousand dollars. But he must go to and 
fro with his imperfect theory. It is spoiled 
by the rights of other preachers. Thus, 
against all labour unions not strictly moral, 
the laws of the human race rise up. The 
rights of mankind oppose them. All society 
is founded upon the rights of man — not of 
the man who works for three dollars a day, 
but of the man also who works for one dollar 
or for any sum whatever. Any force in 
a labour union means anarchy, A guild, 
without violence, may be imperfect, but, 
with violence, it is infamous. 
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The Message of David Swing 

Where would our city and perhaps our 
Kation have been in this September, had not 
the labourers in the town of Pullman and in 
the whole land been for the most part law- 
abiding? The churches may confess the 
rashness of the strike, but we must forgive 
the mistakes of those who respected the rights 
of mankind and the laws of the land. Many 
toilers were so patient and law-abiding as to 
give promise of being worthy citizens of a 
great country. "What all those workmen 
need is a leadership worthy of their cause or 
their flag. 

The flag of labour is a perfectly glorious 
one — too grand to be carried by a fanatic or 
a simpleton or a criminal. Capital is nothing 
until labour takes hold of it. A bag will 
hold money, but a bag cannot transform 
that money into an iron road, a bridge, a 
train of cars, an engine. An armful of bonds 
did not fling the bridge over the arm of the 
sea at Edinburgh ; the bonds of England 
did not join the Mediterranean to the Ked 
Sea ; gold did not erect St. Peter's at Rome ; 
nor did it lift up any of the sublime or beau- 
tiful things in any art. Money came along 
and attempted to buy the canvases of Angelo, 
but it did not paint them. The millions of 
1 88 



The Duty of the Pulpit 

people who came here last summer did not 
come to see the millions of money, but to see 
what labour had done with money, and they 
saw a great spectacle. What domes ! What 
arches ! What " Courts of Honour " ! What 
canals ! What statues I What machines ! 
What pictures! What jewels! What 
thought ! What taste ! What love ! And 
yet the whole scene was the matchless em- 
blazonry of labour. As God manifests Him- 
self in the external objects of earth and in 
the millions of stars, thus man speaks by his 
works, and in our world labour sits enthroned. 
Capital is a storehouse of seeds ; labour is 
their field, their soil, their rain, and their 
summer time. Over a potency so vast and 
godlike, only Wisdom herself should preside. 
If our age has any great men — men whose 
hearts are warm and pure, and whose minds 
are large as the world, — it should ask them 
to preside over the tasks and wages of the 
labourer. Anarchy, Crime, and Folly should 
be asked to stand back. Those three demons 
may be called to the front when our labourers 
are seeking for poverty and disgrace. 

You have all heard of the hostility of 
capital to labour. But there is no special 
truth in the phrase. Labour is just as hostile 
1S9 



The Message of David Swing 

to labour. The whole truth is this : Man is 
not anxious to spend his money. There is a 
saying that " the fool and his money are soon 
parted," but we have not reached the maxim 
that labour loves to make presents to labour. 
Did you ever know a blacksmith who was 
happy to pay large bills to the plumber ? 
Are the carpenters anxious to have their 
tailors advance the price of a suit of clothes ? 
Are the " walking delegates " for the plaster- 
ers anxious to pay the farmer a dollar for 
wheat ? If reports be true, there are labour- 
ing men in the West who are so hostile to 
the labour of their brothers that they are 
going to buy most all needful things in the 
shops of England. 

Thus labour is as great an enemy of labour 
as it is of capital. The hostility between 
labour and money is a mischievous fiction, 
gotten up by dreamers and professional 
grumblers, who wish to ride into oflBce or 
fame by parading a love for the multitude. 
This false love ought soon to end its destruc- 
tive career. Last June and July it cost the 
working men many millions of dollars. Had 
some walking delegates of Christianity told 
these men that labour and capital are eternal 
friends— that labour is the language of 
190 



The Duty of the Pulpit 

money, the body it assumes, the life it lives, 
— our summer would have been full of indus- 
try and honour. How could Krupp hate the 
men who are doing his will in massive iron ? 
How could Field hate the men who were 
laying his cable in the ocean ? The Church 
must help stamp all our industrial falsehoods 
into the dust, and must wave over all men 
the flag of brotherhood. 

So rapidly has friendship grown between 
capital and labour, that a law is now before 
the British Parliament looking to a com- 
pensation to each labourer or his family for 
injuries the working man may have received 
in the execution of his task. When passed, 
this law will each year give ten millions of 
dollars to the working class of the three 
islands. This law is not coming from the 
" club " or " gun," but from the Christianity 
of England. 

This new humane philosophy has counted 
all the toilers who have been injured in their 
toil. It saw fifty-seven men killed while 
building the Forth bridge, and one hundred 
and thirty die among the wheels and machines 
used in digging the Manchester canal. This 
new kindness has studied longer and found 
that of each ten thousand men employed on 
191 



The Message of David Swing 

the railways, fourteen are killed in a year 
and eighty badly crippled. In the long past 
there was no love that counted these dead or 
injured men. A dead labourer was as a dead 
horse or a dead dog. The riots and destruc- 
tion and barbarity of last July set back all 
this new friendship, and made brotherly love 
despair of the present and future. The Evil 
One hath done this. Endless abuse, endless 
complaint, endless violence, openly taught 
anarchy, have succeeded in making work the 
enemy of money. You can recall the Bible 
story of the person who came at night and 
sowed tares among the springing wheat. 

The fact that the United States army had 
to hasten hither to save life and property 
cannot all be charged upon the immigrants 
in our land. We have of late years been 
producing a group of Americans who care 
nothing for right or wrong, and who have 
become the masters of all the forms of abuse 
and discontent. It is evident that the influx 
of anarchists ought to cease, but we must 
not forget the crop our Nation is growing out 
of its own soil. All the cities seem uniting 
to make law ridiculous. The alien who will 
sell his vote for a few shillings is not so low 
as the American who will prefer these votes 
192 



The Duty of the Pulpit 

to principles. The immigrant may act 
through the absence of patriotism for his 
new land, but the American acts through 
total depravity. 

The foreigners are generally manipulated 
by political confidence men, who are home- 
made. 

The general theme of this morning is too 
large for the narro^v limits of an essay, but 
it is possible for us to feel that our great 
Christian organism ought to be applied, from 
these dark days onward, to the making of 
the Christlike character. The Church, Cath- 
olic and Protestant, has lived for all other 
causes ; let it, at last, live for a high intelli- 
gence and for individual righteousness. Lit- 
erature and science and the public press will 
help the Church. All these wide-open and 
anxious eyes must perceive clearly that our 
national and personal happiness must come 
from the study and obedience of that kind 
of ethics which became so brilliant in Pales- 
tine. Our Jewish friends need not call it 
Christian, and our rationalized minds need 
not call it Divine. What is desirable and 
essential is, that its spirit shall sweep over 
us. Called by any name, it is a perfect sal- 
vation for our country and for each soul. 
193 



The Message of David Swing 

The time and money the Chm'ch has given 
to a metaphysical inquiry and teaching have 
been a total loss. In the great college 
courses, there are studies in classic language, 
and in high mathematics, that strengthen 
the intellect; but no such virtue has ever 
been found to flow from the theological 
studies of the Church. For hundreds of 
years the mind has found in these enigmas 
its slow doctrine. Tliere, thousands, even 
millions, of thinkers have found their grave. 
There, the colossal mind of even a Pascal 
grew confused and weak. There, great men 
have lost their blessed earth while they were 
fighting over the incomprehensible. God 
did not give man this globe that it might be 
made a desert or a battle-field, but that it 
might be made the great home of great men. 
As often as creeds and dogmas have de- 
tached the mind from humanity, literature 
and art and science have rushed in to save 
the precious things of society. But these 
agencies have done this only by carrying, in 
prose and verse and science, the laws of love, 
duty and justice, by delineating man as a 
brother of all men and as a subject in the 
mighty kingdom of law and love. In an 
age and in a republic marked by an amazing 
194 



The Duty of the Pulpit 

effort to turn all things, all days, all life, into 
gold, our pulpits must make a new effort to 
reveal and create man the spiritual being, 
man temperate, man studious, man a lover 
of justice, man the brother, man Christlike. 
The same science that is seeking and finding 
the sources of wealth, and that is filling the 
young mind with longings to become rich, 
can find and teach all the worth of man as a 
spiritual being, and can compel a great na- 
tion and a great manhood to spring up from 
the philosophy of the soul. 

To reach a result so new and so great, the 
pulpit must select new themes. It must cull 
them from the field where the mob raves, 
from the shops where men labour, from the 
poverty in which many die, from the office 
where wealth counts its millions. Even so 
beclouded a pagan as Virgil sang that when 
the mob is throwing stones and firebrands, 
and is receiving weapons from its fury, if 
Wisdom will only become visible and speak 
to it, it will listen, and at last obey. We 
have the mob ; it is high time for a divine 
Wisdom to speak to it. 

Our planet not only rolls on in the em- 
brace of the laws of gravitation, of light and 
heat, vegetable and animal life, and the 



The Message of David Swing 

strange encompassinent of the electric ether, 
but it flies onward amid spiritual laws far 
more wonderful — laws of labour and rest, 
laws of mental and moral progress, laws of 
perfect justice and of universal love. Oh, 
that God, by His almighty power, may hold 
back our Nation from destruction for a few 
more perilous years, that it may learn where 
lie the paths, in which, as brothers just and 
loving, all may walk to the most of excel- 
lence and the most of happiness ! 



196 



Addresses and Papers 
Foreign 



A ROMAN HOME 

A Letter to his Friend Ximines, from Tiro, a 
Slave of Cicero ^ 

Deae Ximines : 

I am still near the spot where my 
master was murdered. I am in his deserted 
library, and from a place so full of sacred 
memory, I must now write to you a long 
letter with the long-promised grave and light 
particulars about this greatest of the Romans. 
As though you were a woman, you beg to 
know all about the house and the wife and 
the children, and even the table and the en- 
tire private life of this orator. The wish is 

1 Marcus Tullius Tiro, a Greek slave belonging to 
Cicero, He was made a freedman, and -was Cicero's 
librarian and amanuensis. He is believed to have much 
improved the art of stenography. This imaginary letter, 
while quoting from genuine "Familiar Epistles" of 
Cicero, is supposed to have been written by Tiro to hl3 
friend Ximines. It gives graphic details of Roman cus- 
toms, and much concerning the life and death of the 
great orator, who was killed December 7, 43 B. c. 

199 



The Message of David Swing 

well enoiigli ; because you can thus compare 
Kome with Athens. Your wish shall be 
gratified in part, for the cruel death of my 
kind master only last week renders sacred 
even the small things that now come up to 
notice or to memory. Even this double ink- 
stand, with black ink in one side and red in 
the other, recalls the dead, for it is the very 
one which my Cicero shook up when he said 
he must write more distinctly to his brother 
Quintus. 

Does it seem so to you ? — but I have in- 
deed been the secretary and librarian of this 
Roman for twenty years. You remember 
that when I was a mere lad in Athens and 
was being taught the two great languages 
and all letters that I might be a literary 
slave to some of the Athenians, Cicero, who 
was then in our city to study rhetoric with 
old Demetrius, formed quite an attachment to 
me, and hoped to call me some day to Rome. 
Twenty years have now passed since he sent 
for me and paid my former master a large 
sum for his literary slave. Tiro. 

That you may know how light my bondage 
for these years has been, and how well quali- 
fied I am to speak about his domestic life, I 
must insert an extract here from the almost 
200 



A Roman Home 

daily letters which Cicero sent me when he 
was absent, and when I was sick at Tusculum. 



" I did not imagine, dear Tiro, that I should 
have been so little able to bear your absence, 
but indeed it is almost beyond endurance. 
Should you embark immediately you would 
overtake me at Leucas. But if you are in- 
clined to defer your voyage till your recovery 
shall be more confirmed, let me entreat you 
to be careful in selecting a safe shijD, and be 
careful that you sail in good weather, and 
not without a convoy. It is true I am ex- 
tremely desirous of your company, and as 
early as possible, but the same affection which 
makes me wish to see you soon makes me 
wish to see you well," 



And I must add here, lest I forget it, that 
my master never struck me nor scolded me, 
nor did he ever treat any of his slaves with 
any cruelty. Some of the Komans do indeed 
abuse then* servants, and one matron recently 
ordered one of her dressing maids put to 
death because she arranged badly, or made 
some error in the toilet of her mistress ; but 
I never saw any such inhumanity in the house 
of my great master. I must insert here an 
extract from another letter : 
20 1 



The Message of David Swing 

"I dispatched a letter to you from this 
place yesterday, where I continued all day 
waiting for iny brother, and this I write just 
as we are setting out, and before sunrise. If 
you have any regard for us, but particularly 
for me, show it by your care to reestablish 
your health. It is with great impatience I 
expect to meet you at Leucas ; but if that 
cannot be, my next wish is that I may find 
Mario there with a letter. We all, but more 
particularly I myself, long to see you ; how- 
ever, we would by no means, dear Tiro, in- 
dulge ourselves in that pleasure unless it may 
be consistent with your health. I can forego 
your assistance, but your health, my dear Tiro, 
I would love to see restored, partly for your 
own sake — partly for mine. Farewell. 

'^Alyzia, Nov.,' 5 A. M., 70S A. U. C." 

Such kind letters he continually wrote me, 
and so many, that now I have quite a num- 
ber of them, and how valuable they are, since 
they make me feel not that I passed long 
years of painful servitude with such a man, 
but instead, long years of elevating com- 
panionship. 

When coming hither, so many years ago, 
on reaching the harbour nearest the Formian 
Yilla, I found on the shore quite a crowd of 
people and an assortment of conveyances, 
much like those we have at home ; there 

202 



A Roman Home 

were carriages for those who had furthest to 
go ; there were litters for those who lived 
only a few stadia over the hills. I inquired 
for the house of Cicero, and was pointed to a 
man as being the good Koman himself. In 
a plain but elegant litter sat my future mas- 
ter. In another elegant one with embroid- 
ered curtains sat his wife Terentia Cicero, 
and the little daughter TuUia. These litters 
were resting on their wooden braces, while 
the sixteen slaves, whose business it was to 
carry them, were lounging around in the sun, 
almost every one of them having his hand 
full of ripe figs at which he was munching 
cheerfully. Cicero had come partly to meet 
me, but partly from the custom the rich fami- 
lies have of going to the harbour, when they 
see a vessel coming in. This great Roman 
Demosthenes seemed glad to meet me, and as 
we went home, I walked alongside his litter, 
and as the curtains were looped up, he talked 
all the while in a most elegant manner. He 
found me quite familiar with recent and old 
books, and at each discovery that I could 
speak both Latin and Greek correctly, his 
face brightened. 

I then thought him a very homely man. 
He was thin and pale, and his neck was very 
203 



The Message of David Swing 

long. When he reached over the rail to look 
forward or back, his neck seemed long as 
that of a crane. But amid the beauty of his 
character, the plainness of his person passed 
away. Terentia seemed cold and unbending 
and did not so much as speak to me, but 
TuUia, the little daughter, called out to me 
to ask if I would not help her get out her 
lessons in Greek. 

Did you know, Ximines, that the wealthy 
Romans do not limit themselves to one coun- 
try place ? In addition to a costly city resi- 
dence, my master had fourteen villas for his 
summer or winter pleasure. Wherever an 
island or a harbour or a hill especially pleased 
him, he bought or built a house, and several 
places were given him by wealthy friends, 
who were or might be his clients in law, or 
who were moved by simple friendship. Many 
large sums were given to this lawyer in the 
wills of those who had been near him in life. 

Happy summers we spent sailing or jour- 
neying to and fro among these beautiful 
places of rest. The Tusculum Yilla was the 
favourite of us all, and the chief of the group. 
It was in the border of Rome. From it we 
could see all the public buildings in the one 
direction and all the beauty of hill and vale 
204 



A Roman Home 

and water and sky in another. Here were 
our library, our pictures, our statuary, our 
best gardens and fields, our fowls, geese, 
ducks, pheasants, peacocks and pigeons. My 
master's city residence was costly, and was 
wonderful in its ornaments and apartments, 
but we all loved more the resort out at Tus- 
culum. That city home, Clodius, the -consul, 
in the depth of malice, ordered to be razed 
to the ground when he banished Cicero. For 
days the mob and also the better people could 
be seen carrying off fragments or ornaments 
or plunder from that overthrown palace. 
But a change of consuls soon came and 
Kome recalled the exile and rebuilt our city 
house. 

Our Tusculum villa is built much like a 
general's camp, the soul being in the centre, 
the body, the impedimenta, being located all 
around the valuable part. The main hall of 
the villa is the soul. Here is the conversa- 
tion, here the beauty, here the feast, here the 
art, here the whole family. All around are 
the shops and sleeping bunks of the servants. 
This villa is approached through a long lane 
of dwarf box. This accommodating shrub is 
trimmed and bent into the shapes of animals 
in a pretty or grotesque manner. Eampant 
205 



The Message of David Swing 

lions and the panther so much seen in the 
games, the peacock and other birds, are 
on either hand as you approach the 
main entrance of the house. The structure 
measures about a hundred feet across the 
front and extends back fully two hundred 
feet. The exterior is set apart for rooms for 
the artisan slaves. Our carpenter has one, 
our tailor one, our groom one, our cook one, 
and thus on until the family is in the midst 
of quite an army of these domestic troops. 
Like almost all the Roman houses it is built 
of brick, but some parts of it are lined with 
marble. But Eome is a brick city, the bricks 
being about one span square. 

Entering this large square by a beautiful 
gate, you are passed inward by the keepers, 
and after a few steps you come into the great 
hall, which is the home of the Cicero family. 
Marble columns support the roof, which is 
raised high above the head. Marble is under 
foot. All around one stands statuary, most 
of which come from Greek towns. The side 
walls are made of stucco, and these are ex- 
quisitely painted. To the height of a man 
above the floor, the colours are dark, and the 
figures are set ones, but above that the colours 
are very bright and the figures either perfect 
206 



A Roman Home 

vines and flowers, or else images of human 
and divine ideals. In this immense room we 
ate and talked, and played and laughed, and 
gave parties, and danced and were happy, 
until death entered the gate to break up this 
island of the blessed. In some Koman houses 
in the city there are steps to lead up to a 
second story, but this is rarely the case. 
The bedchambers are recesses from the great 
hall and sometimes there is one sleeping berth 
above another, and the one who sleeps above 
climbs up by two pins inserted in the masonry. 
At Tusculum, my master had a bedroom 
made for himself in the rear of the building. 
He had ordered deadened walls on all sides, 
and a window that he could darken ; that 
when he had been up late at night he might 
not be disturbed by that clatter of all kinds 
made by the slaves, nor be awakened by the 
too obtrusive sunshine of the morning. 

The library was a room with the walls on 
all sides arranged for books. Each book 
had its little cell, like the holes in which our 
pigeons live. It was not my place to take 
care of the volumes, but to read them to my 
master and to his family and friends ; and to 
be forever seeking for new truths or ideas 
or beauties for the great orator's happiness 
207 



The Message of David Swing 

and use. He had a slave who looked after 
the binding and dusting and arranging of 
the works. Cicero would not permit a dirty 
cover to remain on a volume, nor a soiled 
label. All must be bright and cheerful, much 
as the good man was himself. One set of 
books he had such as I never saw at Athens 
— books full of portraits. He had seven 
hundred portraits of distinguished Komans. 
As Brutus and Ccesar had the same pictures 
in their libraries, I concluded and heard that 
there was some shop where one picture could 
be multiplied until all could have copies; 
but I have not yet found that ingenious 
shop. 

Our library is ornamented in fine manner 
by paintings and statuary. Now I remember 
how mad my master was, when, having 
ordered Atticus to buy him some good pieces 
in Greece, that erring friend shipped to us a 
lot of cupids and nymphs. My master did not 
want such stuff in his rooms. 

Passing out of the library, one comes to 
the flower-garden and fish-ponds and poultry- 
yard. How much that great Cicero did love 
his geese and peacocks and chickens and 
pigeons ! Even when he knew he must 
make an important speech that day, and 
208 



A Roman Home 

when he was full of care about the oration, 
he would yet take the time in the morning 
to go out and see how the pigeons and 
pheasants were getting along. I have known 
him to pay a large sum for two pigeons' 
eggs that he heard would hatch out some 
rare species. In the flower-garden and 
among the fruit trees, the dinner and supper 
were often served in the summer months. I 
often read aloud while the family ate. I 
loved thus to read, for the grass under foot 
secured for us such a silence that reading and 
hearing were more delightful. 

Pennit me now to rest you a little, dear 
Ximines, by leading you from the small to 
the great, for you know, dear friend, the 
soul is so constructed that it can find rest in 
going from the little to the large, or from 
the large to the little. Man can walk a 
circle with less fatigue if at times he changes 
his direction. Let me tell you about Cicero 
as a student and an orator. He was wider 
in his tastes than our Demosthenes. You 
know our orator loved only matters of State, 
but this Roman loved all books and all 
things. He read everything he could find. 
If I found a good passage I went to him 
with it, perfectly assured that he would en- 
209 



The Message of David Swing 

joy it whether it was prose or poetry, or law 
or religion, or geography, or only a piece for 
exciting laughter. In one w^ay or another, 
all he saw or heard or read, helped him in 
either his public speeches or his conversa- 
tions. All that w^ent into his brain came out 
again in some better shape. 

He will live in the world's fame as an 
orator, but I shall remember with deepest 
pleasure his fun and talk at home. Every 
evening friends came in. There ^vere Tre- 
batius and Hortensius and Atticus and Kufus 
and Brutus and Cato, and by degrees my 
master would become aroused, and all even- 
ing long he would pour forth jokes and anec- 
dotes or else would quote gems from the 
poets. He was a mimic of manners, and 
would keep all delighted by mimicking all 
the bad and eccentric speakers of the city 
and the clowns of the day. Grave as my 
master was in his public addresses, he filled 
some of his letters to friends and sometimes 
the rooms of justice and always our home, 
with sayings that led to much laughter and 
much good cheer. In all the letters he 
wrote to the young lawyer, Trebatius, w^ho 
had gone with Caesar on his British expedi- 
tion, there were seldom any words except 

2IO 



A Roman Home 

those of pure humour. He expressed in one 
of them the opinion that his friend had gone 
over the sea, that he might be the greatest 
lawyer now living in Britain. In another 
he opines that the reason why his friend had 
remained carefully away from battle could 
not be found in any cowardice, but it must 
have been in the unwillingness of a student 
of law to be guilty of making an assault. In 
one of the replies of Trebatius, there were 
signs that some former writing had been 
erased to leave the page blank for the letter 
to Cicero. In the next missile to this absent 
friend, Cicero expressed a wonder what could 
have been on that paper that could have made 
it less valuable than the proposed letter — he 
concluded that what was erased " must have 
been one of your own [Trebatius'] briefs." 

When Yerres was upon trial for defraud- 
ing the people of Sicily, for stealing statuary 
and jewels and pictures, and for assessing 
and collecting most unjust taxes, Hortensius 
defended, and Cicero prosecuted the accused. 
It was known to my master that Yerres had 
sent to his attorney a valuable piece of 
marble — an Egyptian Sphynx. In the course 
of the examination of witnesses, Hortensius 
became angry at one of those on the side of 

211 



The Message of David Swing 

the prosecution, and thundered out that he 
wanted no riddles but a plain statement of 
facts. Cicero said calmly, " Hortensius, you 
should be glad to get a supply of riddles 
since you have at home such a valuable 
sphynx." This quite upset the gravity of 
the crowd, and all laughed over the predica- 
ment of the distinguished Hortensius. 

There was a form of literary sport which 
was my master's great delight — a double use 
of a word ; a use in which the hidden import 
would suddenly spring up, bringing always 
a pleasure. These double-edged words he 
loved to send off to this same fun-loving 
Trebatius. He reminded him that the win- 
ters would be cold up in Gaul, but that his 
regimentals, when they should come, would 
keep out much cold ; and that Caesar would 
perhaps have some hot work for him ; and 
that upon the whole he was not so hopeless 
as a soldier as he was as a lawyer. Trebatius 
having remained on the peaceful side of a 
river while Caesar went over to fight, Cicero 
congratulated the friend that he had so far 
eliminated all ill-will from his heart that he 
had become unwilling even to cross water ! ! ! 

Indeed I shall not deny that to see the 
housetops covered with people and the streets 

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A Roman Home 

densely crowded with a multitude, all silent 
to hear Cicero speak against the cruel Verres, 
or the despot Antony, was a great spectacle 
and one which it was my fortune often to 
witness, but, for some reason, my own mem- 
ory will cherish most those evenings in the 
villas when the jokes were so good and all 
were so perfectly happy. Julius Ccesar at 
one time determined to gather up in a little 
volume all the Cicero stories and witticisms 
he could find, but I fear that the last five 
years of Caesar's life Tvere passed in so much 
war and turmoil that he never prosecuted 
his intention. At none of the bookstores do 
I find any such volume. I need no such 
volume, but the laughing world will. 

My master spoke much like the orators 
we have seen and heard in Athens. He imi- 
tated and he acted as he spoke. He threw 
himself about from place to place on the 
rostrum and seemed to have in him the souls 
of a whole company of men. When he first 
began speaking in public, he was so full of 
action and passion that he injured his health 
and was compelled to leave Kome and seek 
peace abroad. He spoke just as do the act- 
ors in the theatres, changing his face and 
voice to suit each style of the changing 
213 



The Message of David Swing 

thought and argument. He had an extreme 
ambition and seemed to know in youth that 
he was destined to be great. When he en- 
tered the law some wanted him to change 
his name, for Cicero meant only a vegetable. 
They told him it did not sound large enough. 
He said in reply that he would keep his 
father's name and make it sound honourable. 
He wore out his health in a few years and 
sailed to Greece for rest. On his return, he 
assumed a manner a little more quiet but it 
was still very full of action. But, my good 
friend, he was a wonderful man. I always 
attended him wheii he was to make a speech 
that when he came to write it out fully after- 
wards, I could aid him if he had lost any 
particular thought or the structure of a sen- 
tence. I have known the lawyers opposed 
in a case to my master to venture no reply 
but to abandon their cause after Cicero had 
made his opening speech. 

A rather amusing event took place while 
Caesar was dictator, only a few years ago. 
A case was before Caesar. The evidence 
having been all taken, Caesar was about to 
give his judgment and had declared that no 
speeches need be made as his mind had been 
made up fully that the person charged was 
214 



A Roman Home 

guilty. Cicero arose to make a brief volun- 
tary plea. Ceesar said jokingly that he had 
not heard Cicero for so long that it would 
be rather pleasant to hear the good fellow 
speak once again. He heard him ; got 
amazed and highly wrought up, and dis- 
charged the accused as being the most inno- 
cent man of his acquaintance. 

Ah, my Ximines, let me tell you more now 
of the home life of the dead orator and 
master, more dear to me as a master than as 
an orator. Let me tell you briefly about the 
social scenes in our city house, and also in 
the villa at Tusculum. One of our largest 
reunions of friends was given when Cicero's 
only daughter TuUia had just begun to 
attract the attentions of Roman lovers. As 
soon as night had fully come the friends be- 
gan to pour in. Some came by carriages, 
some by the popular litter. At last you 
could have seen gathered in the hall Julius 
Csesar and his wife ; Decimus Brutus and 
Marcus Brutus, Cato, Hortensius, Marcus 
Antony, Crassus, Quintus Cicero, the brother 
of my Marcus, Pompey and Publius, Crassus 
Atticus, Casca, and a hundred other such 
notable men. N'ot any less was the number 
of the noble women and maidens. Pomponia, 
215 



The Message of David Swing 

the wife of Cicero's brother, came early and 
had begun to chat with her sister-in-law. 
Cornelia, the daughter of Metellus Scipio, 
was there dressed in plain, but rich costume, 
for she was a woman of intellect rather than 
of dress. She resembled the Cornelia of 
Gracchi fame. The Lgelia girls were pres- 
ent in all their style of costume and beauty 
of face. There were three of them, and 
they might have stood for three Graces. The 
talk that Cicero thought too highly of these 
daughters was all old time gossip. 

In this throng were not a few of the 
Koman "pretty men," liomo hellus. The 
hellus homo is a man wholly devoted to 
fashion and dress and pleasure. The number 
of these has greatly increased of late j^ears. 
The young men in general seem to be of 
this sleek and effeminate school. The sons 
of the great senators and orators are for 
the most part idle, pretty men, who part 
their hair with the utmost precision and 
smell of all the perfumes of the South. They 
wear snow-white robes, and powder like 
women to make white their bare arms ; and 
in the wearing of rings they equal any 
matron of this dying Republic. These 
youths gathered that night in one corner of 
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A Roman Home 

the great hall, and with a few equally silly 
girls they humuied o^er part of Nile love- 
songs, and lounged in the large soft seats de- 
signed for the ladies of rank. 

Most of the love-songs here locate their 
scenes of romance and the actors in the 
scenes over on the Nile ; not only because 
Cleopatra has introduced there an era of 
sentiment, but rather because the spirit of 
romance always linds its ideal land away 
from home, there being no witcher}'- in 
things that are near. I remember that we 
boys at Athens sang of Eoman adventure, 
but coming hither I found the Roman young 
souls locating the exploits of successful and 
unsuccessful love as far as possible away 
from all existing realities. It must belong 
to human nature to cover up with enchant- 
ment hills and vales and peoples that are 
just beyond the eye's field of vision. 

At times I heard some elegant measures 
from some thoughtful poet, but for the most 
part these brainless youths sang little verses 
of which I may give you here a fair sample : 

If you would live your life 
In the light of woman's smile, 

And escape all toil and strife, 
Then away to the Nile ! 
217 



The Message of David Swing 

There my barge may float all night 
On the love-creating stream, 

Where the soft and amber light 
Changes life into a dream. 

My love is in the boat 

And I am by her side ; 
Oh, let me ever float 

On this love-producing tide. 

In Eome at all hours of the night one can 
hear some part of this shape of song rising 
up from the streets, and so tally alive is the 
whole city to the romance of love affairs, 
that even old men whistle these tunes as they 
plod along to work or to idleness, generally 
to idleness, for none but slaves pursue any 
toilsome occupation. 

Of this trifling class was Cicero's son 
Marcus. At least, while he was away in 
Greece at school, word often came to us that 
he was living in a dissipated manner and 
was spending much more money than had 
been allowed him. But not of this foolish 
class was the daughter Tullia. She resem- 
bled her father in her love of learning and of 
wise conversation, and thus when our parties 
were given this beautiful girl was found 
talking with Ceesar or Pollio or Archias, 
rather than with the fops at the other end of 

2X8 



A Roman Home 

the corridor. Had I not been only a servant, 
it would have been an immeasurable joy 
could I have sought and gained her love. 
As things were, I confess, my dear Ximines, 
my heart beat quickly with happiness when 
she would request me to bring her a certain 
volume and read for the company, at her 
command, some sentiment that had given her 
delight. My partiality, perhaps, made me 
admire her dress more than the magnificent 
toilet of Csesar's wife or the gay attire of 
the Lselia daughters. On this particular 
evening Tullia wore over her wine-coloured 
dress a delicately tinted pink scarf which 
quite enfolded her. It had a still brighter 
border. Her hair was heaped up rather 
negligently on her head, and was held in 
place by a gold arrow. As she played on 
the harp and sang, she showed a sandal with 
a rim of gold all around the sole, and a per- 
fect network of pearls covering the instep of 
her almost sacred foot. Add to these orna- 
ments a golden ball which she would at 
times toss to some, and from which would 
gush forth a little cloud of perfumed dust, 
and you can see this loved and now wept-for 
Tullia. I used to wonder what the great 
father would have said or done had I ever 
219 



The Message of David Swing 

taken by the hand that beautiful being, or 
had I ever addressed a note of affection to 
her. Now that both are dead I am glad 
that my insane love never ventured forth in 
formal language. 

On this evening we had for the feast all 
the fish and fowls and fruits known to 
Roman or Greek, and the most elegant 
wines. Cicero loved glassware with quite 
a passion, and his engraved goblets were 
passed freely about, filled with their nectar 
of Bacchus. Caesar, the most distinguished 
of our guests, ate but little, but you should 
have seen him eat once at our Formian^ 
house. He announced that he was intending 
to have a full feast, and feast he did, for he 
intended on rising from dinner to take an 
emetic, and spare himself the pain of digest- 
ing such a load of meat and fruit and wine. 
You know the feast-goers often do this — eat 
all they can, with the intention of taking, 
after the meal, this " emetikon." The glut- 
tons do it, not that they may escape distress, 
but that they may return and eat a second 
dinner the same night. They create a 
stomach like that of the vulture, which can 
load and unload almost at pleasure. 

'This villa of Cicero's was in Formiae, Italy. 
2 20 



A Roman Home 

For another reason Caesar's visit to our 
Formian village was remarkable, for he 
brought with him a thousand men, soldiers 
and friends. Most of them encamped in the 
garden, but my master had to feed all out- 
side the environs and to entertain the impor- 
tant men of the number within the walls, 
and they ate and drank in a most hearty 
manner. Next day, when the company had 
departed to the last man, Cicero came up to 
me in the library, and remarked, with a grave 
face : " Ceesar is indeed a very notable guest, 
but he is not one of those fellows to whom, 
on his going, one says, ' Call again.' " 

My master was no feasting man. There 
were only a few simple things he could eat. 
Ko fish or oyster could he digest, and even 
after all the care he took of his health he suf- 
fered all the years I was with him. He drank 
wine, but seldom to excess. Only one night 
is recalled now when he came home with his 
intellect clouded by wine. He had been 
out spending the evening with two fellow 
lawyers, and coming home about midnight 
he did not as usual come into the library, 
but he passed straight to his room. In the 
morning he mentioned, with regret, that he 
feared he had drank so much the night 

221 



The Message of David Swing 

before as to expel his wits, for his com- 
panions had asked him for an opinion of a 
law point and he now felt that he had 
given a foolish reply. On consulting the 
reports I found that my master had not 
been very drunk after all. The question 
that had been raised at the neighbour's was, 
whether an heir to an estate could bring 
action for damages the estate had sustained 
before it actually came into his possession, 
he being the legal heir apparent ? 

My dear Ximines, I must give you rest from 
these small matters, by telling you now in 
rapid succession of four large events ; I may 
call them the four dark days of all the long 
years. In their books the Egyptians and the 
Persians tell of days when the sun did not 
shine, but showed a black, sullen face ; when 
the wild bird flew to its nest, and the cattle 
bellowed and groaned in the fields. Be these 
stories true or not, dark days came to our 
house. First came the divorce of the wife 
and mother, Terentia. On a certain day, 
only five years ago, this wife and mother 
bade Tullia farewell, and left the home 
where she had been through all the period 
of her girlhood and middle life. I saw little 
reason for such a crisis in the house. I am 

222 



A Roman Home 

positive that the event came so gradually 
that all the parties — the husband and wife 
and daughter — were already reconciled to 
it when it came really to pass. My master 
had had many great trials, and under them 
was growing old. He needed perfect peace 
in his home, and constant praise from all. 
Terentia managed badly all the money 
matters. She never praised in any manner 
her famous husband : but on the opposite, set 
up an opposition of feeling, if I may so speak. 
Cicero was himself so great that he filled the 
house to such a degree that there was no 
room for another. Tullia was full of demon- 
stration over all her father's speeches and 
writings ; and as she drew ever nearer her 
father, the mother to that degree receded. 
By degrees Terentia began to look away 
towards the house of her own father as 
offering her an asylum, and with the large 
dowry handed back to her, which she had 
brought Cicero in her youth, she went away 
from our villas forever. It is a good quality 
of Roman law that a man who puts aside his 
wife must first restore to her the dowry 
she brought him in her days of youth and 
beauty. She could not come rich and go 
away poor. 

223 



The Message of David Swing 

No sooner had our home circle recovered 
from this calamity than there came the 
greatest one that could have assailed the 
tender heart of my master. Tullia suddenly 
died. In about her twentieth year, this 
daughter, whom he had called the " honey 
sweet," took away from earth her blessed 
face and language. 

She had been married, but yet her father's 
home was almost all the time cheered by her 
presence ; and when the word came from her 
sick room that the disease had become sud- 
denly alarming, the grief of the illustrious 
father was most extreme. Death came very 
suddenly. All the deep philosophy of my 
master failed him. Letters from all the great 
men of the land came to him, bearing all 
forms of consolation, and some full of reproof 
that such a statesman should be so broken 
down by the death of only a daughter. But 
letters brought no softening of the affliction. 
"We withdrew to our villa of Astura, because, 
being upon an island, it offered the broken 
heart two blessings — security against the 
intrusion of man, and the presence of all the 
sweetness of nature. Here, in this lonely 
place, my master did not even desire my 
presence any longer, but alone, every morn- 
224 



A Roman Home 

ing, he would walk away to the woods, and 
would not, perhaps, until evening emerge 
from their sympathetic shadows. He was 
also alone much in his library, and, entering 
it in his absence, I would find on his table 
outlines of monuments and forms of epitaphs. 
His heart, unable any longer to look for- 
ward, was thus looking back. Life has been 
awfully injured when it looks only back. 

The tragic fate of Ceesar soon followed, to 
conceal the tomb of the " honey sweet daugh- 
ter." All the patriots, and all the rivals of 
Caesar, too, had feared that the Ides of March 
would see him declared king. The friends 
of this royal movement had pretended to find 
oracular dictates that only a king could con- 
quer the Parthians. As the Ides drew near, 
the city became restless and suspicious in all 
ways at once. On the morning of the Ides 
we all went to the Senate. By noon Cicero 
and I, his servant, were in our places, anx- 
ious, but uncertain. My master knew of no 
conspiracy. All began to wonder that C^sar 
did not come to preside, for there seemed to 
be business awaiting transaction. I learned 
that night that Caesar had resolved, as by 
mere accident, to stay at home until the 
much talked of Ides should have passed by. 

225 



The Message of David Swing 

That morning his wife had told him that she 
had dreamed that he had come flying to her 
in the night, saying, " Save me ! " This 
helped detain Caesar. He had also gone out 
in the garden in the morning to note how 
his doves and pheasants would fly when he 
should feed them or call them. They came 
up on his left hand. This also helped him 
in his resolution to let that day pass by in the 
most possible of retirement. The conspira- 
tors, finding the day passing and that their 
victim would perhaps not come to the forum, 
made out a pressing demand for the imagi- 
nary king, and sent down a messenger to 
Caesar's house, telling him that a case of 
importance was being argued, and that the 
Senate would be gratified if he would come 
and preside. He at once dismissed his secret 
forebodings, and ordering out his litter, en- 
tered and was borne along to the assembly. 
To a watchman on the street he remarked 
pleasantly : " Ah, friend, the Ides of March 
have come, and have brought no trouble." 
" Come, but not gone ! " was the reply. 

Seated upon his Chair of State in the Curia 

Pompeii, Caesar asked that the case be at 

once presented. Tullius Cimber then said 

that he had a brother in exile whom he would 

226 



A Roman Home 

now petition the Senate to recall ; and while 
pleading for this brother he grew more and 
more earnest, and at the end of each sentence 
took a step forward as though he would lay 
his affectionate pleadings upon the very breast 
of Julius. Other senators, too, began to 
speak as though the case were one of tre- 
mendous importance ; and as they spoke 
they, too, moved gently forward. It is my 
own impression, dear Ximines, that they 
overdid their earnestness, and that Caesar's 
heart suddenly divined that the eloquence 
was full of something more terrible than the 
exile of Cimber's brother. Caesar arose from 
his seat, but in an instant the dagger of Casca 
gleamed and came down. I heard the dead 
sound of the blow. In his fearful tremulous- 
ness Casca had struck his grand victim only 
in the shoulder-blade. Caesar grasped the 
dagger, and screamed forth in a loud voice, 
"Casca, you villain, what means this?" 
While we all gazed, horror-stricken, sud- 
denly other daggers gleamed and struck, 
and the great man, muttering some pathetic 
words which I could not catch, fell heavily 
upon the floor. Some relate that he said, 
" And thou, Brutus ! " Others told me next 
day that when he saw Brutus raise his dagger, 
227 



The Message of David Swing 

he said, " And my son ! Brutus ! " It had 
long been rumoured that Brutus was a son 
of Cassar. 

In a few days after this thrilling event, my 
master began to say that it was a great over- 
sight in the Eepublicans not to have slain 
Antony ; that he was more willing to be a 
despot than Julius had been, and that had 
the conspirators invited him (Cicero) to their 
liberty feast, there was one dish that would 
not have been carried away uncarved. My 
master despised and feared Mark Antony. I 
must close this letter, dear Ximines, by telling 
you how this enmity soon hurried my Cicero 
out of life. When Antony and Octavius and 
Lepidus formed the second Triumvirate, and 
deceived the people by giving them three 
tyrants instead of one, each two of the Tri- 
umvirs conceded to the other the privilege 
of putting to death his greatest enemy. 
Lepidus demanded Lucius Cassar ; Octavius 
demanded Paulus ; Antony asked the life of 
Cicero. 

We were at the Tusculum villa. A mes- 
senger came in fearful haste, his horse almost 
falling from fatigue. Cicero and his brother 
went out to meet him, and in a few moments 
came back into the great hall. Cicero said 
228 



A Roman Home 

to me, calmly : " Antony has condemned me 
to death." My heart sunk. I was in a mo- 
ment glad that Tullia had passed to the 
grave, which has no fresh sorrow. A group 
of servants were called, both boatmen and 
porters, and, having gotten ready the most 
essential things, we hurried to Astura, one 
of my master's villas, a few stadia away. 
Should we reach that point, from there we 
should sail for Macedonia. But there was 
little hope of a final escape from the wide 
domain of Rome. The road was literally 
sprinkled with our tears. When we halted, 
each stood with an arm around his friend, 
and Cicero and his brother embraced each 
other many times, and bade many farewells ; 
for, in my master, friendship was as vast at 
thing as learning or eloquence. 

We sailed from Astura, but, after a day 
out in tough weather, Cicero grew sick, and 
at the same time he felt a great longing to 
risk his native land, or die upon its soil. He 
made our seamen sail into a harbour where 
we had a villa, and there we all disembarked. 
The porters took up the litter and bore him 
to our beautiful Formian house. Here we 
had known happy times in the past. When 
we had gotten into the ample hall, he said, 
229 



The Message of David Swing 

" Let me die here, in the country I have 
attempted so often to save." 

He lay down to sleep. It was the 7th of 
December. In only a few moments, servants 
came in from remote parts of the farm, say- 
ing that horsemen were coming towards the 
house. The porters did not wait for the 
order or even the permission of Cicero, but, 
affectionately taking him up, they laid him 
in the litter, and told him they must go back 
to the ship. We had advanced only a hun- 
dred paces when the assassins closed up 
around the baffled group. The slaves set 
down the litter. Cicero parted the curtains, 
and reaching out his head, gray with age 
and trouble, he addressed one of the pursuers 
by name, and said : " Strike me, if you think 
it is right." The bloody men halted an in- 
stant. The face before them was calm and 
noble. The hearts, conscious of guilt, faltered, 
but only for an instant. Herrennius, who 
had dismounted, stepped forward, and, with 
a half dozen ill-aimed and cruel blows, he 
severed the head from the body. The body 
remained in the litter ; the head rolled over 
on the earth beneath. The hands, too, were 
cut off and were borne to Antony, who or- 
dered them to be fastened up in the Forum, 
230 



A Roman Home 

where the lips and hands, too, had been so 
eloquent against kings. 

My dear Ximines, I heard this matchless 
speaker deliver more than thirty great ora- 
tions, and I have read all his books and let- 
ters, and am thus familiar with the utter- 
ances, public and private, of his great soul, 
but, to my memory, no words of his come 
now with more significance or beauty than 
those uttered in the last days of his life : " I 
try to make my enmities transient, and my 
friendships eternal." 

Your friend. 

Tiro. 
Tusculum Villa, Dec. 19, A. U. C. 710. 
IThe year 43 B. C] 



231 



XI 
DANTE' 

EACH myth is probably believed by the 
tribes which first utter it. Children 
are often six or seven years old before they 
turn away from the realism of Santa Claus 
and his sleigh, but no lapse of years can turn 
the mind away from Santa Claus as a sym- 
bol. To us who are oldest the myth is just 
as valuable as it was when it Avas not a myth 
but a truth to the mind of our childhood. 
By the time a race has reached the power to 
produce a literature it has passed the period 
of belief in its own wonderland. What was 
once true turns into mental furniture, orna- 
ment, available capital, a pictorial language. 
We Americans have just as much use for 
Hercules as Yirgil had, because the story en- 
ables us to express the difficulty of cleaning 
the Augaean stables of a city, and to slay that 
Lernaean Hydra which infests each metrop- 
olis of the American Occident and Orient. 

1 Born in May, 1261 ; died September 14, 1321 A. D. 
232 



Dante 

It is impossible to learn now hoAv mucli 
Homer believed of his own tale, but it seems 
almost certain that he dealt with the do^: 
Kerberus just as the Egyptians had used the 
animal before Homer and exactly as our 
Milton made use of the Hell Hound in recent 
years. 

Some Greek realist of the Socratic period 
said that Homer ought to be removed from 
Greek thought, because he taught the people 
a mass of fables ; but the human family has 
not regarded the suggestion, for fables are 
what we all want. We do not feel them as 
truth, but as powerful illustrations of truth. 
"VVe want them as language. We do not 
want Lot's wife as a pillar of salt, but we do 
desire to keep in mind that if an educated 
and beautiful woman starts towards some 
noble life and then concludes after all that 
she would rather dance and sing in a base- 
ment saloon, she ought to be smitten into 
some insensate stick, stock or stone. Her 
life possesses no value. 

It seems just to Dante to look upon him 
as making that use of the wonderful to which 
Virgil and Ovid had subjected it, but only 
for nobler purposes — for the decorations of 
a higher theme. Milton did not believe in 
233 



The Message of David Swing 

any of his details, but we all come from the 
" Paradise Lost " with the simple feeling 
that we have for hours and hours been in a 
world above and beyond our setting sun. 

When Dante finds a group of souls existing 
in the form of trees of w^ hich the leaves sigh 
in eternal sorrow and drip wdth a bloody 
dew, he simply borrows from Ovid, and 
especially from Virgil, whose companions in 
attempting to pull up a shrub are amazed to 
hear its roots cry out : " Do not lacerate me 
thus, for I am Polydorus." To Dante's 
living human trees are added as appropriate 
birds the Harpies which had figured at the 
camp of ^neas. 

Each writer in each successive period 
becomes heir to an enormous lot of images 
and pictures which become his language. 
The personal relation of Virgil to his myths 
■was that of Goethe to his Faust, and of Milton 
towards his Satan, and of Klopstock tow^ards 
his elegant angel Ithuriel. Mr. Hamilton 
Mabie delineates in one of his books some 
mysterious movements on the part of Nature. 
The winds, the black clouds, had been angry 
for many hours ; they had in some manner 
impressed the lightning and thunder into 
the atmospheric misunderstanding ; great 
234 



Dante 

volumes of blackness had been flung at the 
sun by day and into the face of the moon at 
night. The unpleasantness was all a mystery 
until daylight having come, our friend threw 
open his shutter and saw the apple trees in full 
bloom. "We now dismiss all the intellectual 
machinery of which the writer made use and 
simply thank him for dispelling our stupidity 
and coaxing us to look at a blossoming 
orchard. He did not believe in any quarrel 
in the upper air. Thus Homer, Virgil, Dante, 
Milton and Shakespeare are all practical 
common-sense men, but they are rich in 
intellectual furniture. Their ability to put a 
truth on a stage was wonderful. But Dante 
and Beatrice are not a piece of absolute 
realism. The sweet girl was much more 
loved than many, but so was Yirgil a favourite 
of Dante. Beatrice was simply the one 
blossom, highest and reddest, of a luxuriant 
soul. Yirgil, Statius, Rachel and Matilda 
all share with Beatrice in this outpoured 
love in Dante's great work. 

Dante was nearly forty years old when he 
toiled at the production of the now illustrious 
poem. He was about thirty years distant 
from that boyhood morning in which he 
looked with such rapture upon the child 
235 



The Message of David Swing 

Beatrice. Whatever may have been the 
dazzle of those youthful days, nearly all 
thoughtful persons who live in this century 
cannot but feel that that romance of the 
tenth year could have reached the fortieth 
only in the form of a beautiful memory. 
Kom antic love is one of those small boats 
which, although magnificent as the barge of 
Cleopatra, is better for a coast service than 
for crossing the wide sea. Thirty years are 
too wide an ocean ; Dante's bannered barge 
did not cross it. But there is an event that 
is common — that of a sensitive and noble 
mind looking back and bedecking with new 
tears the object it kissed long ago. When 
cares and misfortunes have been many, and 
when the future becomes too small to contain 
much of hope, the past all reopens and the 
heart arises and says : I will go back to my 
father's house. There love and plenty await 
me. The more husks and swine about the 
feet, the more willing and grand is the re- 
turn. 

It is quite unjust to Dante to think of him 
as " the lover sighing like a furnace, with a 
woeful ballad made to his mistress' eye- 
brow ; " for although he did inscribe a mighty 
sonnet to the eyes of his mistress, he must be 
236 



Dante 

granted the credit of having waited until the 
love which came at first sight had been sub- 
dued by all the worldly events of more than 
thirty years. He was, indeed, wonderfully 
sentimental, but he was also a soldier, a 
statesman, a scholar. Beatrice was only a 
colour thrown over a varied life like the 
colour of a sunset, whose hues turn sky, land 
and trees, living or dead, into pure gold. 
But there was nothing of the weak young 
man in the nature of Dante. His era was 
romantic. To be in love was the privilege 
of each separate person ; and so open-hearted 
were the Italians that the new or the old 
attachments of each one were matters of 
confession and common conversation equalled 
in our day by the themes of science or poli- 
tics. 

Dante and Beatrice were parallelled in the 
lives of many men and women of those 
intermediate centuries. The Minnesingers 
and the errant knights had made song and 
love rank as fine arts. It was the wonderful 
prevalence and power of love-song that 
induced Dante to break fri-endship with the 
.Latin language and utter his soul in the cur- 
rent words of the people. He wrote the 
first part of the "Inferno" in the classic 
237 



The Message of David Swing 

tongue, but in the years in which that manu- 
script was resting he reached some new 
appreciation of the popular speech, and when 
he resumed the comedy the thoughts ran out 
in harmonious Italian. It is probable that 
the Latin tongue had become so associated 
with the law and theology of the age that it 
seemed unable to be the accompaniment 
of the song the poet intended to sing. 
Language, like all other objects, is liable to 
become the victim of associations. The same 
sentimentalism which exalted Beatrice ex- 
alted the Italian dialect. The language of 
his love overpowered the language of his 
theology. 

Admitting that all the fashionable people 
of that period made romantic love a channel 
and expression of culture, we must concede 
that Dante possessed a poetic sensibility 
which made him almost outdo his own age. 
Whatever may be the genius of a time, there 
will be leaders in the dominant pursuit or 
condition. If the age be scientific, there will 
be ISTewtons ; if it be philosophic, there Avill 
be Lockes and Hamiltons ; if it be religious, 
there will be Xaviers and Marquettes. While, 
therefore, Dante loved according to the cus- 
tom of his times, he was eminent in his de- 
238 



Dante 

partment and no doubt surpassed the common 
crowd in a kind of adoration of persons. In 
our own times it is evident that John Stuart 
Mill, Henry Hallam, and Robert Browning 
were capable of carrying more than the com- 
mon quantity of affection. The death of 
young Hallam, of Mrs. Mill, and of Mrs. 
Browning v^ere shadows wonderfully deep 
in the hearts upon which they fell. Mill 
and Hallam never again saw earth in its old 
beauty. Those two graves made each sunset 
bring tears. Upon Dante there must be seen 
falling the full, rich untorn mantle of his 
country and epoch. In the midst of love he 
was above all ; he was a dashing leader in 
the great battle-field of the heart. 

The age which made this poet so romantic 
also transformed the adored child and woman. 
When a girl possessed great beauty and great- 
ness of character, she became an emblem 
while she lived and almost a divinity after 
her death. The world was still so young and 
illogical, so wonder-loving, that it personified 
all spiritual beauties and virtues. The con- 
crete was dearer than the abstract. The 
Greeks and Eomans worshipped a little army 
of Minervas, Junos, Venuses, Dianas, and 
nymphs, because they did not respect the real 
239 



The Message of David Swing 

woman enough to tempt their hearts to make 
for her a throne or a pedestal. Each Minerva 
proclaimed the absence of the real woman. 
"When woman became great in learning or 
talent she declined in morals, and Aspasia 
and Cleopatra were so affected by gossip that 
when men wished to worship womanhood 
they turned towards Minerva rather than 
towards the favourites of Pericles and Mark 
Antony. 

The invasion of the world by the New 
Testament wrought a gradual but at last a 
radical change. Those gospels and letters 
chased the Yenuses and Dianas out of art 
and created a demand for such earthly sym- 
bols as the Marys and the Magdalens. Ce- 
cilia, Teresa, and quite a long roll of human 
saints made the worship of Beatrice possible. 
Much as the Protestants may be opposed to 
the mariolatry of the Roman Catholics, they 
should confess the services which the " Ave 
Marias " have performed in behalf of woman- 
hood. They have taken from the clouds, the 
groves, the fountains and the sea the virtues 
of a thousand nymphs and have conferred 
them upon the terrestrial woman. John 
Stuart Mill and his wife make up of woman- 
hood a better picture for man than that of 
240 



Dante 

Numa Pompilius and the goddess Egeria. 
Since the Mary of Bethlehem came, humanity 
has wasted less worship over the chimeras of 
the childish ages. It has used all its intel- 
lect and sentiment in the upbuilding of the 
kingdom of womanhood. It has not been 
drained of wealth by a costly foreign policy. 

To exchange the goddesses for womanhood 
was not only what would seem a good form 
of barter looked upon in any light, but it was 
rendered more profitable to civilization by the 
fact that the womanhood must be idealized in 
order that the orators, poets and lovers could 
pass from Diana to Mary, from a Juno to a 
Beatrice. There must be some resemblance 
between the old divine and the new human. 
The Marys and Marthas were thus thrown 
upward into a figure larger than the reality. 
The 'New Testament so exalted the plane of 
female life that it soon became very possible 
to have in Kome or Florence human emblems 
of a physical and moral beauty which had 
always been supposed celestial. Olympus 
was displaced by Florence. 

It was in a climate full of the warmth of 

nature, in an age of romance, in a time of 

transition between the unreal and the real, 

that the boy Dante met the girl of exceeding 

241 



The Message of David Swing 

beauty. That she was the loveliest creature 
of the times no one need deny. According 
to Carlyle, each generation contains its love- 
liest face as well as its worst book or meanest 
man. By very slow degrees Dante wove 
this loveliest face into his poems as a most 
fitting motive. Not only did he wait for the 
beauty to die and become an angel, but he 
had patiently and silently passed over the 
time and fact of her marriage. It was te^ 
years after her death and about fourteen 
years after Dante's marriage to another 
w^oman, that his poems began to appear in 
the name of the infinite friendship. 

It would thus seem that the poet in the 
noon of his sad experience, driven by his 
inward genius to hold up his generation to 
the gaze of the people, selected this dead and 
half-idolized beauty to be the motive of his 
long symphony. 

Dante did not bear patiently his banish- 
ment. He made repeated attempts to get 
back to his city with its beauty and precious 
friendships, and at each failure his heart 
became more melancholy and his fury more 
flaming. The volume which slowly grew in 
his mind was not a simple poem, not a love- 
story. It was an encyclopgedia of Italy. 
242 



Dante 

Italy had been in a political turmoil for the 
several generations in which the two parties 
struggled for supremacy — the papal power 
and the temporal power — the former an 
absolute throne, the latter a constitutional 
monarchy. The papal party was founded 
upon miracles, the limited monarchists upon 
the history of Greek and Roman law. The 
struggle of those two ideas made Florence 
and Rome battle-grounds not only for swords 
but for words : and by the time Dante had 
drunk in a heart full of political wrongs and 
sorrows, he had in mind a large number of 
persons who ought to be thought of as in 
hell or purgatory, and his heart held a 
memory of many noble ones who ought to 
be dreamed of as in heaven. 

The book was thus too great to be a love 
story ; it was intended to be the history of a 
period — a bar of judgment created as an out- 
line of the final day of punishment and 
reward. If any persons now living should 
open the volume with the thought of finding 
in it any love-making, any rapturous lasses 
over proposal and acceptance, it is not in the 
power or extent of this essay to express the 
disappointment they will experience as they 
read; but if any one loves to mark what 
243 



The Message of David Swing 

political and religious ideas were moving 
slowly across the Eleventh, Twelfth, and 
Thirteenth Centuries, what silent formations 
as cloud and storm were reaching up in 
the sky, what rifts there were through 
which shone the sun, what kind of political 
leaders needed perdition, what kind of popes, 
cardinals and bishops needed the limbo of 
pain and regrets, what noble ideas had come 
down from the classics, what nobler ones 
from the simple truths of Palestine, what 
lofty beings had risen up in every age, what 
groupings of truths genius can make, what 
lofty decorations the art of literature can 
rear upon the thrilling or beautiful facts of 
our race, and how poetry can draw the truest 
portrait of history, to such a one the work 
named " Dante " will seem not a tale of 
romance but a vast stream of knowledge and 
eloquence, 

Dante was not a Beau Brummell, nor an 
N. P. Willis. He was a heroic character, 
ready to be a soldier or an ardent student of 
Paris or Padua. He was once ruler in chief 
of the Principality of Florence ; a citizen 
king of the town that could grow such people 
as Beatrice. He was no languishing lover. 
He was rather a combination of part Pericles 
244 



Dante 

and part Homer. Beatrice was not a part 
of Dante's life, so much as a part of his 
literary art. In life, he loved her a little ; 
in literature he loved her deeply. 

Dante was the transition heart between 
the old poetic epic and the new era of novels. 
When the " Divine Comedy " was written, 
no novel had ever been composed. Had this 
Florentine lived six hundred years later, his 
beautiful girl would have become a Mrs. 
Kobert EUsmere, and Dante's scorn would 
have missed the Pope and smitten John 
Calvin and modern Orthodoxy. But fortu- 
nately for us, in the Thirteenth Century the 
novel had not yet been invented. 

What is a novel ? Literature in general is 
that part of the world's thought that is 
beautiful. The truth in the algebra or in the 
grammar is real and useful, but it is not 
beautiful. As music is not sound, but only 
beautiful sound, as architecture is not the art 
of building, but of building beautifully, so 
literature is that thought or truth which 
comes to us commended by ornament. 
The novel is a book of truth or thought, or- 
namented by the presence of an attractive 
woman. As man has viewed and measured 
his world, the most attractive object under 
245 



The Message of David Swing 

the wide heavens is woman. Man thinks 
well of daisies and roses ; he approves of the 
rainbow ; he cannot but speak kindly of the 
ocean ; but his words grow" the most eloquent 
when he comes to speak about some woman 
of great absolute or alleged beauty. 

Bowing before this shrine, Homer asked a 
Helen, a Briseis, a Penelope, to decorate his 
long stories ; Sophocles had impressed into 
sweet duty the matchless Antigone ; Virgil 
had used Dido and Lavinia to act as colours 
for all his fields and clouds. When in the 
last lines of Virgil, the dying Turnus says to 
his rival : " Tua est Lavinia conjux," etc., 
" Lavinia is thy wife. Follow me no longer 
with thy vengeance," those words were 
prophetic of a day when a beautiful or frail 
woman would ornament a million books 
which should terminate each one in a wed- 
ding or a funeral. But Dante w^asyet living 
under the Greek and Latin administration. 
As Homer had asked Penelope to wave per- 
petually her flag of beauty, as Virgil had 
made Dido and Lavinia allure the world 
along over his lines, so Dante knew perfectly 
well that we should all pass more willingly 
through Hell and Purgatory, and through 
Heaven's gates, were we all aware that be- 
246 



Dante 

fore us ran or floated a half divine Beatrice. 
When in mature life, this Italian leader and 
statesman determined to write an epic of 
Italy, he could not forget that a beautiful 
womanhood had often been the musical 
accompaniment of human reflections. Man- 
hood has also stood for an ornament, but man 
as such has never equalled woman in the 
ability to create or furnish a fine art. Dante 
marked how the Homeric verses had made 
thoughts plead and fail or triumph around an 
attractive Helen. Had not Penelope inspired 
a poem of general travel and adventure? 
Had not Dido and ^neas helped Yirgil to 
make a continuity of beads of every size and 
colour ? Beatrice was so matchless in beauty 
and character, and had been so exalted by 
the absence the grave had brought, and she 
was so precious to Dante's personal memory, 
that his lips must have said : " I will ask her 
to cast a charm over my survey of the Italian 
state. She will exalt the reader while she 
exalts me. She shall be a standard of vir- 
tues in comparison with which the blackness 
of the age will remain undoubted. She will 
gladly come back to me, for my misfortunes 
will make all the scenes of my youth return, 
and the past will fill a heart that no longer 
247 



The Message of David Swing 

possesses a future." Thus comes the book 
to us, a song indeed, but also a history, a 
philosopliy, a sketch-book, an oration, a gal- 
lery of pictures, a synopsis of the Thirteenth 
Century. 

Dante might well be called the first states- 
man of the Christian period. He came in 
advance of English and German letters, and 
although the Magna Charta had been created 
in England a few years before Dante was 
born, one of the twenty Oxford colleges had 
just been founded. It was a mere grammar 
school in those days. London and Paris 
were on the margin of that political light 
which was still shining out from the classic 
sun. Italy was nearer the centre. The 
politics of the Greeks and Romans flowed 
westwardly along with their languages, but 
they had not gone much beyond Florence 
when this great mind studied them. 

In this continent when a great railway is 
opening out westwardly, industry, wealth, 
houses, streets, schools and churches spread 
out fan-like around the terminus of the high- 
way. When after some years pass the road 
is carried a hundred miles onward, the local 
congestion diminishes and the power passing 
along the iron rail runs to another terminus 
248 



Dante 

and repeats there its fan-like opening. Thus 
in the T\Ye]ith and Thirteenth Centuries the 
vast Greek and Koman highway ended in 
Florentine Principality, and as leaves and 
blossoms grow where the vine is cut off, thus 
a high politics threw out its leaves where the 
Latin road ended or the Latin vine was 
broken. Two parties arose, sometimes called 
the Guelphs and Ghibellines, sometimes the 
Whites and the Blacks. Called by what- 
ever name, those two divisions were the same 
old ones of all times. The Guelphs implied 
the rule by constitutional law. Following 
the example of nearly all great minds, Dante 
espoused the broadest right and principle 
and became the sturdy Republican of his 
period. He argued for the separation of 
Church from the State and won the fame of 
orator before he won the fame of poet. He 
antedated Count Cavour five hundred years, 
and wrote down political maxims which are 
now the practice of the whole "Western world. 
The treatise " De Monarchia " carried the 
idea of constitutional politics so far that it 
argued for a unity of all the states of Europe 
with such home-rule here and there as a 
change of circumstance should demand. The 
monarchy Dante dreamed of differed little 
249 



The Message of David Swing 

from the England and America of to-day. 
To meet this unity of States the same broad 
thinker advocated a unity of language, and 
showed how the fourteen dialects of Europe 
were at bottom only one tongue. Of this 
unity of law and language and race the 
Papal absolutism was the one natural enemy. 
Hence came the parties, Guelphs (Papal) and 
Ghibellines (monarchical), hence the skir- 
mishes and battles of centuries, hence the 
slaughter of the Albigenses which came a 
few 3^ears before the birth of the poet, hence 
the slaughter and exiles of the Huguenots 
long after, hence all the horrors which came 
between. 

It was Dante's attachment to the idea of 
human unity that made him select Virgil 
and Statins as dramatis personce in the poem 
in which the Christian Beatrice was to be 
the leading character. Such a grouping 
came from the feeling that genius and mo- 
rality make all times and persons to be one. 
In Dante's visions Pagan and Christian move 
along side by side. David was crowned 
King of Israel Avhile ^neas was landing in 
Italy, and Christ came into the world at a 
time when He could be aided by the reign 
of Caesar Augustus. Plato, Socrates, Py- 
250 



Dante 

thagoras and Cicero were the same in sub- 
stance with the Fathers of the Church. In 
the eternal world he saw Plato, the idealist, 
and Aristotle, the realist, sitting down to- 
gether in equal honour or imperfection. 
Boethius, the philosopher, coming five hun- 
dred years after Christ, joined with the 
pages of Cicero in making Dante declare 
that philosophy had become the mistress of 
his soul. As Solomon had long before 
painted Wisdom as an attractive woman who 
took her place near the city gates and ut- 
tered lessons to the passing throng, so Dante, 
deeply coloured in all the profound thought 
which lay between Plato and Boethius, de- 
clared his Beatrice to be the living emblem 
of that wisdom of the world : 

" O lady, thou iu whom ray hopes have rest, 
Who for my safety has not scorned, in hell 
To leave the traces of thy footsteps marked. 
For all mine eyes have seen, I to thy power 
And goodness virtue owe and grace. Of slave 
Thou hast to freedom brought me, and no means 
For my deliverance hast left untried. 
Thy liberal bounty still towards me keep 
That when my spirit which thou madest whole 
Is loosened from this body, it may find 
Favour with thee. So I my plea preferred ; 
And she so distant far, looked down. 
Smiled once and towards the eternal fountain turned. ' ' 



The Message of David Swing 

The scene preliminary to this prayer seems 
to take the poet away from the mere char- 
acter of a lover and transform him into a 
mind busy among the problems of Florence 
and of society. Beatrice had vanished from 
his side, and when he had cried out, 
" "Whither has she vanished ? " an aged man 
appeared instead and replied that the loved 
one had sent him to point out the higher 
throne to which she had risen. So Dante 
let eye run upw^ard, throne above throne, and 
there he beheld his idol high up among the 
eternal truths and the infinite liberty. It is 
not probable that Beatrice stood for any one 
form of truth, that of religion or politics, but 
for that philosophy which is the highest 
form of truth and thought attainable in all 
the departments of mental industry. She 
was to Dante a living embodiment of what 
our more abstract century has embodied in 
the hymn " Nearer to Thee." Beatrice stood 
for all height — political, ethical and religious. 

With such internal reasons of being, this 
poem began at once a career of influence. 
It would not have created the Italian lan- 
guage had it not possessed an internal great- 
ness which clothed its melodious words with 
power. Dante did not make a language by 
252 



Dante 

joining the dictionary to mere poetic beauty ; 
he was made more powerful by his having 
the courage and the statesmanship that could 
attach language and beauty to what was 
greatest in civilization. That which com- 
pelled one pope to forbid the reading of the 
verses was the element in them which car- 
ried them along. It was known that Dante 
had declined in anger a permission to return 
to Florence if he would return a penitent 
and pay also a fine. He said he was not so 
earthen-hearted as to go back like a truant 
schoolboy or as a criminal. He must return 
in honour or not at all. He could see the 
sun and stars when outside the city, and 
could ponder over sweet truth under any 
sky. Thus the poem rested upon funda- 
mental truths and the person of a hero. 

To the dignity of its themes the work 
adds all the confessed elements of true poetry. 
The art is a high art. The natural style of 
Dante is as full of surprises as that of Hugo. 
It is intense and condensed. Often a word 
or a phrase rings out like a trumpet or the 
discharge of a heavy gun, and then follows 
the tranquillity of a few lines. One of his 
cantos begins thus : 

" Broke the dead stillness of my brain a 
253 



The Message of David Swing 

crash of heavy thunder." He arose and 
looked around. The reader is aroused along 
Vv^ith the writer. The thunder was the only 
bell fit to awaken such a traveller in the 
Inferno. No rap on the bedroom door, no 
breakfast bell, would be adequate call for one 
who is to advance a few paces and find men 
and women in the regions of eternal grief. 
A crash of heavy thunder was just the 
awakening the traveller needed in that awful 
gulf. When the fact or event needs the 
softened speech of sympathy, the rude 
sounds all cease, and the poem runs along 
like the bird song in the "Siegfried" of 
Wagner. 

To the now living reader of Dante the 
book has become only a treasure of detached 
gems. So many persons in the work are so 
unknown to us that but for humanity's sake 
we should not care whether the poet had sent 
them to heaven or hell. We cannot pass 
judgment upon their doctrines or their con- 
dition. It is necessary to leave many such 
matters with the artist ; but at intervals all 
through the long creation come episodes that 
belong to the Nineteenth Century and Thir- 
teenth alike. The continuity of the tale is 
gone, but there is a lapful of pearls now off 
254 



Dante 

their silken string. When Dante speaks of 
a forest in spring time it is for our hearts he 
speaks. The woods is the one through which 
we have all walked in some happy day of 
perhaps early life. 



" Through that celestial forest whose thick shade 
With living greenness the new coming day 
Attempered, eager now to roam and search 
Its limits round, forthwith I left the stream, 
Through the wide woods leisurely my way 
Pursuing o'er the ground which on all sides 
Delicious odour breathed. A pleasant air 
That intermitted never, never veered, 
Smote on my temples — a mild wind 
Of touch the softest, at which the boughs 
Obedient all bent trembling towards that point 
Where first the Holy Mountain casts its shade, 
Yet were not so disordered but that still 
Upon their top the feathered quiristers 
Applied their wonted art, and with full joy 
Welcomed those hours of prime, and warbled loud 
Amid the leaves which to their happy notes 
Keep tenour, just as from branch to branch 
Along the piney forest, on the shore 
Of Chassi rolls the gathering melody." 



Dante knows just when silence is more 

eloquent than speech. He detects those 

moments when two or three words contain 

more power than a hundred, but he also 

255 



The Message of David Swing 

knows of those places where speech is richer 
than silence, and the man who upon one 
page is as condensed as Tacitus becomes upon 
the next page as full and free as Yirgil. He 
is as mutable as water, which is capable of 
acting either as dewdrop or as ocean. 

His lessons as artist or painter, taken in 
his youth, may have added to his love of 
those pictures in which his verse abounds. 
As a painter he opens many a canto which 
he is to close as a philosopher : 

' ' It hath been heretofore my chauce to see 
Horsemen with martial order shifting camp 
To onset sallying or in muster ranged 
Or in retreat sometimes outstretched for flight, 
Light-armed squadrons and fleet foragers 
Scouring thy plains, Arezzo, have I seen, 
And clashing tournaments and telling jousts— 
Now with the sound of trumpets, now of bells, 
Drums or signals made from castled heights 
And with inventions multiform, our own 
Or introduced from foreign land." 

The power of Dante to group details is 
not less than that of those illustrious success- 
ors which time brought, in Shakespeare and 
Milton. When Beatrice stood watching, to 
note on the horizon the chariot of Christ, she 
became a type of such gentleness and affection 
256 



Dante 

that the poet could but liken her to a little 
mother bird : 

" Who midst a leafy bower 
Has, in her nest, sat darkling through the night 
With her dear brood, impatient to discern 
Their looks again and to bring home their food, 
In the fond search unconscious of all toil — 
In the long meanwhile, on the boughs 
That overhang the nest, with wakeful gaze 
Wat-ches for sunlight, nor till dawn 
Eemoveth from the east her eager ken." 

Here the " leafy bower," " the waiting in 
darkness," " impatient for light to reveal the 
hidden faces," the eagerness to bring home 
food, "the unconsciousness of toil," the 
" sitting towards the east " that she may de- 
tect the light sooner, watching for day on 
the leaves that overhang her nest, make up 
that richness which belongs to the universe 
of an Infinite Creator. The common mind 
can allude to a bird upon the nest and can 
join some humane associations for inculcat- 
ing lessons of mercy to the wild boys of the 
street, but a Dante alone can grasp the entire 
scene and can make the soul of the little bird 
stand for that great human race which in the 
long night of earth watches for dawn, and 
in the long shadows turns the face forever 
257 



The Message of David Swing 

towards the sunrise of a morrow. Dante's 
style is all through that of a brocaded silk. 
Five hundred years have separated us from 
much in the poem that was once powerful 
and beautiful, but enough remains to secure 
for the work a place among the most won- 
derful pieces in the literature of the entire 
world. 

What ought to add value to the poem is 
the thought that it helped lead Europe out 
of error and to create for it those waves of 
light which soon began to roll after each 
other over Germany, France and England. 
The verses were perhaps most powerful in 
the Fourteenth Century. They were recited 
in the clubs and parlours of Italy and France, 
and were sung in the streets. They were so 
full of sentiment, thought and rapture that 
while they were laying the foundations of 
political lav\^ they were inspiring all the arts, 
and while they were the preludes of the 
Reformation in religion and politics they 
made Angelo and Raphael appear in the 
arena of beauty. These harmonious verses 
differed from these of Anakreon which would 
not sound anything but love. These Italian 
lines not only sang love as Greek or Latin 
sang it, but they made liberty as eloquent 
258 



Dante 

as love, and leave us to wonder whether 
Beatrice was not herself an emblem of that 
Supreme "Wisdom, all whose ways are pleas- 
antness and peace. 



259 



xn 

MARTIN LUTHER' 

HERE we are in the closing years of the 
Nineteenth Century. Beyond doubt it 
is the greatest Century ever lived by man- 
kind. Some old periods were great in archi- 
tecture, others in war, others in abstract 
philosophy, others in an ascetic religion like 
that of India, others in external magnificence 
like those of Babylon and Carthage, but this 
century contains all the valuable forms of 
eminence which marked the past, and to 
those forms of thought and sentiment it 
adds its own unrivalled stores. Compared 
with the present, old commerce and old phi- 
losophy and old industry and old science and 
old religion were only infants reaching out 
childish hands to play. We find ourselves 
on the banks of such a stream of intellectual 
and moral power as never flowed through 
the nations founded by the Pharaohs or con- 
quered by Caesar or coveted by the early 
popes. 

» Born November 10, 1483 ; died February 18, 1546, 
260 



Martin Luther 

We dare not boast, for little of this triumph 
comes from us. As individuals we are only 
witnesses at the spectacle, without being our- 
selves the amazing scene. "We are to add 
our souls to the vast fact, but it did not come 
from us. We are like the humble crowd 
which received and welcomed Jesus. He was 
greater than they. He arose in the far-off 
mountains and porches of meditation and 
study, and then moved down upon the com- 
mon fields of Palestine. The crowd wel- 
comed Him and afterwards became changed 
into His likeness. Thus our modern glory 
of politics and science and art and law and 
benevolence has flowed down to us, and we 
welcome it with many a hosanna, but instead 
of being its whole cause we are blessed for- 
ever if we are changed into its image. As 
the thick soil is formed by the leaves and 
grasses which fall upon the earth and dis- 
solve into it, so the richness of our century 
is the result of that human foliage which 
budded and bloomed and perished long ago. 
How long the human race has thus been liv- 
ing and dying we know not, but it is possible 
that we are twenty thousand years away 
from the first prayers to God and from the 
first tears that ever fell upon a grave. If 
261 



The Message of David Swing 

Xewton, while thinking of the stars, felt that 
he was onl}'^ a child on the shores of a sea, 
so may we, in looking back at the spectacle 
of man, feel that we are only children stand- 
ing by a measureless wave. Our hearts are 
emptied of all egotism, and from boasting 
we fall to praying for the privilege of help- 
ing onward the advancing world. 

The causes of this stream are back of us. 
To enumerate them would be the study of 
the entire history of man. They must be 
passed by to make room for a single in- 
fluence — that of some peculiar individual 
man. Some single, rare mind of man or 
woman appears upon the scene in this age 
or that and causes a commotion of ideas by 
its own momentum. It has not always been 
a man. The names of Esther and Zenobia 
and Koland and De Stael are enough to as- 
sure us that had not man fettered and de- 
graded woman, power would have been seen 
in the whole past issuing from the lofty souls 
of woman and man. From the nature of so- 
ciety power has been developed in man, and 
his has been the hand that has made and un- 
made the most evil and the most good. If 
woman has been denied power she has thus 
escaped the charge of having brought so 
262 



Martin Luther 

many nations to ruin. Man has touched all, 
and has ruined much upon which his hand 
has fallen. Babylon fell under his vices, 
Rome under his sin and war. But at times 
there has appeared a soul as full of mo- 
mentum as an ocean wave. " Sons of God " 
these are called in the rich poetry of the 
Orient. We, too, would thus speak of all 
gifted ones had not our ISTorthern zone car- 
ried us aY>^ay from that highly wrought, 
emotional nature which traces quickly the 
glory of the Deit}'- and of human life. The 
same parallels of latitude which separate us 
from the aromas of the warm lands, from 
the frankincense and myrrh, separate us also 
from their affectionate language, and we 
bury as a man one whom Arabia and Asia 
would have lamented as a " Son of God." 
To the power of climate and race to hush 
the words of poetry, perhaps also machines 
and inventions and discoveries are adding 
their temptation to us to look to these for 
help rather than to the individual soul. We 
may be transferring our love over to steam 
and electricity, and are yearly thinking less 
of such a living soul as that which we call 
Jesus, of Paul, or Savonarola, or Luther. If 
so, it is our error and our loss, for the truth 
263 



The Message of David Swing 

is that our world does not tremble under the 
pulsations of the engine so much as under 
the beatings of the heart, the rumbling of 
the locomotive being heard not half so far 
as the footstep of a great man. 

Luther repeated history by being born in 
humble life. The wheels of youth rest or 
rust in riches ; in poverty they all run. 
Wealth says, How shall I enjoy myself ? 
Poverty says. What labour shall I perform ? 
Out of the former come those who play ; 
out of the latter those who work. But this 
scarcity of money must be joined to a great 
degree of sensibility and culture inherited 
from ancestors or found in the earliest sur- 
roundings of youth. For if poverty alone 
were able to make greatness the African 
tribes and the Zulus should be supplying the 
world with statesmen, and the mud huts of 
New Mexico should be sending forth poetry. 
That hardness of childhood that grows 
mental force must be attached to an awak- 
ened mind ; it must be a hardness like that 
of Shakespeare and Franklin and Lincoln in 
hearts surrounded by civilization. There are 
women in India who have more sorrow than 
fell to the lot of the Bronte sisters ; but in 
India the suffering is not joined to a cultured 
264 



Martin Luther 

brain. Thus it is hardship and civilization 
combined that make the wheels of the brain 
go. The infant Luther enjoyed such a two- 
fold impulse. Christ was indeed born in a 
manger, but that manger was carpeted with 
all the wisdom of the East, and canopied by 
the love of an enlightened mother, so that 
while the little body of Jesus v/as near the 
straw and hay His soul was where Greek 
and Roman and Hebrew wisdom and taste 
combined to make a new air. Thus Frank- 
lin and Lincoln were born in poverty of 
money but in the perfect splendour of liberty 
and education and hope. 

Luther was the son of a slate-digger and 
cutter who had refinement enough to desire 
to educate his little boy up to the highest 
standard of the period. "When the child was 
only six months of age the parents moved to 
where there could be found in a few years 
the good of education. Thus the natural 
power of the child enjoyed that advantage 
found in the ambition of its father. If it 
was not heir to gold, it was born to an es- 
tate of parental solicitude and ambition. 
Much of German eminence among men had 
come from the devotion of father and mother 
to the care of each child. As each Hebrew 
265 



The Message of David Swing 

mother had a remote suspicion that perhaps 
her boy was to be the saviour of Israel, so 
each German parent easily reached the con- 
clusion that the nation had long been wait- 
ing for his son to appear ; and so far as 
lay in their power the German fathers 
and mothers urged their offspring onward 
towards a dreamed-of destiny. Stilling and 
Mozart and Beethoven and Goethe were not 
only born to great powers, but also were 
whipped to success by their fathers. All 
complain of the pitiless cruelty of their early 
surroundings. Stilling's father whipped him 
almost daily. To common cruelty the father 
of Beethoven added drunkenness ; but yet so 
anxious was he that his son should become 
an extraordinary musician that he falsified 
regarding the child's age that he might seem 
the more a prodigy. In keeping with this 
record Luther came to the task of life miser- 
ably flogged all through his first ten years. 
And vfhat omission of the birchen switch 
may have occurred at home was fully atoned 
for by the zeal of the village schoolmaster, 
and between the home and the schoolhouse 
no lesson of duty or piety remained free from 
this barbarous mode of enforcement. 
In mature life Luther looked back with 
266 



Martin Luther 

something of sorrow upon such treatment — 
sorrow for himself and sorrow for the mis- 
takes of those whom he deeply loved. He 
wrote : " My parents treated me so cruelly 
tliat I became timid. They felt that they 
were sincerely right, but they had no dis- 
cernment of character that would have en- 
abled them to know when and upon whom 
and how punishment should be inflicted." 
"While our times have no sympathy with this 
brutality it cannot but look with approval 
and delight upon the parental care and am- 
bition which encompassed all these great 
children in their old German homes. In 
framing an explanation of many of the lead- 
ing men of the whole past we must find a 
part of the causes of things to rest in the 
culture and ambition of the father and 
mother. Cicero's father moved to Rome 
that he might educate his boy. Augustine's 
mother cared for her child with an infinite 
enthusiasm until he had reached almost 
middle life. She lived for him alone. 

Thus out of a poor home as to money, but 
out of a good home as to judgment and am- 
bition and piety, ca.me upward the mind 
which was to turn the stream of the "Western 
thought and life. In imagination we can 
267 



The Message of David Swing 

picture this youth of fourteen leaving his 
home that he might attend a school that 
should prepare him for the university. He 
performed the journey on foot and carried in 
a knapsack all his worldly possessions. Rude 
as his home had been, the scene before him 
was so dreary that it made the cottage be- 
hind him seem an enchanted ground ; and as 
he moved away from the charm of the one 
and towards the hardship of the other the 
tears rolled down his cheeks. Once located 
at the school he sang songs under the win- 
dows of the rich and supported himself by 
what small coins fell at his feet. He per- 
formed this musical circuit thrice each week. 
At last his voice, rich in itself, but made 
more touching by his poverty, won the sym- 
pathy of a woman of wealth, and out of 
these songs under a window came a woman's 
kindness, which paid for four years of edu- 
cation in that school and for a home in the 
house won by his music. Y ou can recall the 
picture. A boy singing in front of the 
quaint house of Dame Ursula Cotta. A 
kind face comes to the window and looks 
and listens. Weeks and months pass and by 
degrees the dame begins to wish that the 
little Martin Luther would come again. 
268 



Martin Luther 

Each week the coins the kind hand tosses out 
increase in size or in number. At last the 
woman talks with the boy, and hears the 
simple story of his struggles and hopes. She 
at last says : " Well, you need not sing for 
money any more. I shall help thee on- 
ward." 

It must be a matter of conjecture what 
were the songs he thus offered along the 
streets. The Minnesingers who went from 
place to place with their love-songs died 
away in the Fom'teenth Century. The Six- 
teenth Century was in the outset religious in 
Germany. Michelet says Luther inherited 
poverty and piety. But after all is said re- 
garding the religious drift and even supersti- 
tion of the times, there remained much 
margin in mind and heart to be filled up 
with the common songs of sentiment and 
passion. As mankind never becomes too 
pious to fall in love, it is not probable that 
any age ever passed which sang only hymns 
in the streets. Luther may have offered 
some religious piece at some appropriate 
lattice, but when the face half visible showed 
features of beauty and youth the sentimental 
music of the universal heart must have 
brought him the most money. This Martin 
269 



The Message of David Swing 

played well on the guitar, but his voice needed 
no accompaniment. 

Mark the quaUty of his studies in these 
formative years, — grammar, rhetoric, poetry 
and music. Upon such a course our age has 
not made much improvement. Our period 
offers more facts— those of science and 
history — but it offers less of inspiration. 
Facts are a poor substitute wdth the young 
mind for rhetoric and poetry because these 
are the wings of the soul, whereas facts can 
be acquired and retained by a man without 
a soul. Either method is in itself defective, 
A perfect course would be that which should 
combine the acquisition of knowledge with 
the highest development of language and 
rhetoric and the imagination. It was the 
good fortune of this German youth, and of 
the world through him, that he became 
strong in music and poetry and language, 
for these helped him to rise to an enthusiasm 
which was able to burn like an eternal fire. 
When the times needed impetuosity Luther 
became impetuous ; when inspiration was 
asked for this man became inspired. Yast 
learning would have quieted that heart which 
was needed not as a library, but as a burning- 
torch. 

270 



Martin Luther 

Towards such a restless zeal these studies 
all pointed. Poetry underlies more heroism 
than learning alone can boast. It, only, rises 
above the common things of the shop and 
market-place, and perceives the immensity of 
human and divine affairs. The heart, which 
could proceed to the city of Worms to meet 
perhaps death, Vv^as the heart vv^hich could, the 
day before the journey began, compose the 
words and the music of a hymn that seemed 
fully able to sustain its author. The poet 
was the hero. 

" A tower safe our God is still ; 
A trusty shield and weapon ; 
He'll help us clear from all the ill 
That hath us overtaken." 

Thirty-six such lines as these sung in the 
outset and chanted in the choir of the soul 
were the band of music for that march of one 
man against the potentates of the age. His 
prose was all ornamented, like a w^all covered 
with vines. Speaking of a tree laden with 
ripe fruit, he said : " Had Adam not sinned, 
we should have seen the beauty of these 
things ; every bush and shrub would have 
seemed more lovely than though it were 
made of gold and silver. It is really more 
271 



The Message of David Swing 

lovely, but we are stupid as beasts. God's 
power and wisdom are shown in the smallest 
flowers. Painters cannot rival their colour, 
nor perfumers their sweetness ; green, yellow, 
crimson, blue and purple — all growing out of 
one earth. We trample upon the lilies as 
though we were so many cows." 

Poetry is not in itself a divine power, for 
Cowper and Wordsworth could not have led 
in a revolution. Neither could Virgil. But 
when the poetic sentiment is joined to a 
great soul it becomes an irrepressible impulse. 
It does not sit down and write verses, but it 
detects the joys and griefs, the rights and 
wrongs of the people, and weeps and hopes 
while mere learning reads or sleeps. Like 
Dante and Angelo and Milton, Luther had 
power as well as fancy. His success as a 
student was very great. He surprised his 
instructors. He was quick and strong in 
debate, original, full of vivacity, rich in the 
German language, and was perhaps the 
first great orator to venture forth upon 
philosophical debate in the tongue of the 
people. He was a Latin scholar by the time 
he was twenty, but he preferred the German ; 
he brought forward a revolution in speech 
before he led in religion, and from him came 
272 



Martin Luther 

the dialect of Schiller and Goethe and Jean 
Paul Richter ! 

It was the design of the young man to 
study law. It is singular that neither Luther's 
father nor Yalcin's held theology or the 
priesthood in much esteem. Each father was 
heart-broken over the religious drift of his 
son. A comment this, not upon the piety of 
the fathers, for they were deeply devout, but 
upon the condition of the clergy m those 
days. The vices of the age had made their 
black mark upon many of the monastics. 
Many monks who were not dissolute were 
simply lazy beggars. Luther, with all his 
lofty powers, was to take the path of the law. 
It offered some honour and some industry 
and money, and much less hy]3ocrisy. 
Towards this the father pointed, and towards 
it the son turned his face. 

For the law the youth at last had no heart. 
Pure and innocent himself, Luther saw the 
Church through a clear, divine air. Its music 
charmed him. And, moreover, there often 
come to young hearts melancholy years. It 
would seem that early life should produce 
nothing but smiles and laughter. Youth is 
thus pictured by painter and poet, and in 
general it is full of joy or peace ; but for 
273 



The Message of David Swing 

some unknown cause Nature inserts a mel- 
ancholy year between ten and twenty-five. 
Tears come easily. The heart is morbidly 
sensitive. It writes farewell notes to friends. 
The soul loves to creep into its corner and 
distrust the voice of love. A few hearts 
thus in life's sweet morning w^hoUy break, 
and suicide ends the scene. The wave of 
sadness rose high around this gifted youth. 
The storm may have come from injured 
health, but more probably it came from un- 
seen recesses in the spirit. No path of duty 
seemed clearly defined. But as he walked 
in a field with a fellow student a bolt of 
lightning killed the companion in an instant, 
and left Luther still in the world. Full of 
superstition the astounded youth fell on his 
knees and vowed all his powers to God. He 
entered a convent, and thus began the Ref- 
ormation. It was kindled by a flash of 
lightning. 

A fact must be mentioned here which will 
betray at once the need of an overthrow of 
the past. The cup of folly was full. The 
people had been long enough fed upon the 
marvellous stories of ascetics and idlers and 
miracle-mongers. Luther went into the con- 
vent taking with hun two books, the only 
274 



Martin Luther 

books, perhaps, he possessed. "What were 
they? Were they the Testaments full of 
the simple godlike life of Jesus and of the 
labours and teachings and glories of St. Paul 
and St. John and the lofty strains of Job and 
David and Isaiah ? Oh, no ! This educated 
youth of the Sixteenth Century took into the 
convent with him Virgil and Plautus ! The 
secret of the Eeformation is out. Luther 
had been reared to manhood in the church 
without ever having seen the Bible. It was 
almost a lost volume. "Where existing, it 
was in a foreign tongue. Custom of the 
monks had become the standard of morals 
and the basis of all doctrine. 

Virgil and Plautus were pleasant books, 
but not adequate to the production of a civ- 
ilization, ^neas and Dido figured largely 
in the oddities of St. Augustine while he was 
in pagan clouds. But, as it was, Luther took 
into the convent too much logic and rhetoric 
and fervour, for the most aged monks in tlje 
monastery soon became alarmed at the life 
and wisdom and force of the new comrade, 
and they held a secret meeting to determine 
how to check the unsaintly manners of the 
young devotee. A venerable ecclesiastic 
declared such a love of books to be sinf ul» 
275 



The Message of David Swing 

that it elevated too much the individual 
mind when it ought to sit prostrate, meekly 
submissive to the high dispensation of the 
superiors ! Luther was condemned to be the 
man-of-all-work for the convent, and for 
three years he swung the broom, carried the 
wood, scrubbed the stairs, and then with 
the company of a pack-mule, he begged food 
from door to door. " This," said the rev- 
erend theologians, " will break his spirit of 
self-importance." 

In their prophecy they were mistaken, for 
the same mind which had combined drudgery 
and study in boyhood could do so again in 
mature life. The stream of Luther's piety 
and logic and study ran straight on, his 
hours with the pack-mule being hours of 
meditation, and more valuable than hours 
with the monks. In his mind the truths of 
religion gradually fell into a shape quite 
different from the forms and customs which 
had come down from the dark ages. 

All gifts of learning and genius would 
have been vain had not Luther possessed 
piety. His soul was sincerely religious. God 
and Jesus Christ were loved, and Hved for, 
and trusted. Christianity was not a form, 
but it was his joy and his hope. In fervour 
276 



Martin Luther 

ke was more like Mme. Guyon and Ffenelon 
to come after him than like those who had 
passed before him. His hymns were not 
full of theology but of affection : 

Thou strong defense, Thou Holy Light, 
Teach us to know our God aright, 
And call Him Father from the heart ; 
The Word of Life and Truth impart 
That we may love not doctrines strange, 
Nor e'er to other teachers range, 
But Jesus for our Master own 
And put our trust in Him alone. 
Hallelujah, Hallelujah ! 

Thou sacred Ardour, Comfort Sweet, 
Help us to wait with ready feet 
And willing heart at Thy command, 
Nor trial fright us from Thy band. 
Lord, make us ready with Thy power — 
Strengthen the flesh in weaker hour. 
That as good warriors we may force 
Through life and death to Thee our course. 
Hallelujah, Hallelujah ! 

Such was the personal approach of Luther 
towards an unseen but vast work. His 
learning, his natural power, his honesty, his 
fervour, his stubborn will and his unequalled 
courage fitted him to be a leader from dark- 
ness to light. He was one of those whose 
life shines in history like a sun in the sky. 
277 



XIII 
VICTOR HUGO • 

IT is common to look upon France as the 
home of atheism. But such an estimate 
of the condition of faith in that country is 
far from being true. Of the 36,000,000 of 
the French population 34,000,000 are Eoman 
Catholics ; a little over 1,000,000 are Protes- 
tants, thus leaving 1,000,000 within which all 
the forms of anti-religious sentiment are to 
enact their various parts. In a census taken 
a few years ago only 85,000 persons were 
recorded as having no belief or an anti-Chris- 
tian belief. Thus out of 36,000,000 only one 
person in 4,000 is to be quoted as indifferent 
or opposed to the forms and ideas of religion. 
From the common fame about France, with 
the history of the Revolution and Reign of 
Terror and Commune, we have all felt that 
this was the one godless nation of Europe. 
Against this common fame we are met by 
the fact that of the population of France 

*Born February 26, 1802 ; died May 22, 1885. 
278 



Victor Hugo 

more than ninety-nine per cent, are Chris- 
tians. 

But this surprising fact will not explain all 
and contradict all, because we mustreiliember 
that the world is not governed by majorities, 
not even by so large a majority as ninety -nine 
per centum. France has, in one instance, been 
atheistic for a brief period, but it was such 
by a coup cTetat. In that method of seizing 
an empire sometimes a thousand brave men 
will equal a million citizens. For the most 
part Paris has been France ; just as the city 
of Mexico has always been the whole nation. 
At a recent Mexican election of high officials 
not one man in ten took the trouble to go to 
the polls to vote. The voting was all done 
by a few thousands who had some individual 
interests in the result. Thus in France, Paris 
has generally attended to all the political 
business ; and thus a group of a million and a 
half has really stood for the entire mass of 
thirty-six millions. 

Of the enormous religious population 
thirty-five millions are Eoman Catholics, 
and the tendency of that church has always 
been to sink the individuality of the man, to 
make the common millions full of timidity 
and obsequiousness, and to concentrate in 
279 



The Message of David Swing 

ecclesiastical potentates what personal hero- 
ism the Church could produce. We have in 
France the most decidedly Roman Catholic 
country in the world ; the one empire to 
which the Pope has always looked for sup- 
port, Spain not being excepted. But in 
battling against rationalism and what little 
atheism there existed, these ecclesiastical 
millions could do but little. At any time of 
the Revolution Paris contained only a little 
more than half a million of inhabitants. 
Thus the enormous throng of nominal Chris- 
tians was spread out in a nation whose 
domain was 600 miles long by 400 miles 
wide. Furthermore, of this religious popula- 
tion about one-third of those over six years 
of age could not read or write. As there 
were no railways or telegraphs it is almost 
certain that the changes of political situations 
lay in the hands of the great central city and 
a half score of large towns. 

Thus it came to pass that the few atheists 
who finally figured in the Revolution were 
concentrated in Paris, and were men of great 
daring because they w^ere the children of the 
new thought and new mental power which 
at the same time had made our Paine and 
Franklin and the great deists of Europe, 
280 



Victor Hugo 

The French Kevokition did not come from 
irreligion, but from the most awful and long- 
continued oppression and criminality of the 
throne. The Roman Catholics hated the 
Government with a hatred based upon rob- 
bery and starvation. A terrible famine had 
made many thousands of beggars take refuge 
in Paris, and when the States General was 
called to attempt to secure some rights for 
the people these were in the city ready for 
anything that might offer hope of a change, 
for a change could not be for the worse. In 
the States General elected, the first class 
contained 291 clergymen, in the third class 
there were nearly 500 of the better members 
of the people. It was in the chaos which 
came along slowly that a few atheists got 
possession of the reins of power. Even this 
group was divided, for Eobespierre declared 
himself against Danton and avowed himself 
as eager to set up a government which should 
confess God and the immortality of the soul. 
Foreign nations were making use of the sor- 
rows of France to invade her territory, and 
in the midst of such a babel some brilliant 
atheists passed into power. But this reign 
was of short diiration. This godless party 
became the disgust of the millions of Roman- 
281 



The Message of David Swing 

ists and Protestants. The atheists were to 
erase the history of the world, and they or- 
dered a new chronology to begin. They 
were to date letters and documents with the 
year " 1." Having ample power thus to 
name their first year they had no method of 
establishing a succession, and year " 1 " never 
advanced to year " 2." 

These statements seem necessary to re- 
mind us that Yictor Hugo was not the prod- 
uct of an atheistic nation, because there was 
or is no such a nation ; but rather was he the 
true child of that great rationalism which 
began to purify the air in the Christian 
Pascal and the deist Voltaire. The Koman 
Church would not open to admit a new truth 
or to reject an old error. The great mass of 
religious barnacles the holy ship had culti- 
vated and carried along in the Dark Ages it 
attempted to carry along through the Seven- 
teenth and Eeighteenth Centuries. It denied 
they were barnacles, and called them pearls. 
There was no progress of knowledge possible 
in that denomination. This fact made neces- 
sary a belief that should be not only outside 
of the Church, but even full of wit and re- 
sistless logic against that venerable organism. 

The Protestant forms of Christianity had 
282 



Victor Hugo 

been less hostile to reason, but they had a 
horror of the hearts of the children of the 
Pope. An outside religion thus became 
necessary unless men would consent to dis- 
pense with the use of reason. This was so 
large a price to pay that minds by nature re- 
ligious were compelled to live and die with 
a faith partly beautiful but partly injured by 
neglect and lifelong argument. Some few, 
like Lamartine, stood with one foot on the 
old altar, but these were detained there more 
by the French romance than by any regard 
for the moss-covered human theology. The 
sentiments detained many to whom the 
reason was pointing a different road. 

What a brilliant group was this ! Mrae. 
De Stael and Napoleon were in it. There 
stood also Victor Cousin, who perhaps more 
than any man of our century helped turn 
the young generations of France away from 
the philosophy of atheism and towards that 
of God. He was imprisoned for a short 
time by the influence of the priesthood, but 
he came forth to stand wholly outside the 
earthly churches, yet evidently wholly inside 
of the church of the heavenly Father. Un- 
der his touch religion became founded upon 
the deepest reason, and was seen as the ab- 
283 



The Message of David Swing 

solute fountain of human greatness. He 
was a pupil of the Royer-Collard, w^ho spent 
his life in a high philosophy drawn from all 
the noble minds, from Reid of Scotland back 
to Plato of the Greeks, Time would fail us 
to mark those great names which wei'e com- 
pelled, passing life in France, to cherish their 
religious sentiments out in that open air 
where the spirit of reason could associate 
with the spirit of Avorship, and where man 
could be true to his God without being false 
to himself. 

In the midst of this large class, but more 
grand than numerous, stood Victor Hugo in 
his long life, and now in his grave he sleeps 
with them. He was the ripe fruit of that 
Voltairism which could not call folly by the 
name of inspiration, nor a career of sins and 
errors by the name of infallibility ; but to the 
strength of Voltaire he added the rich poetry 
of Lamartine, and thus he contained the vir- 
tues of two great intellects. He bids us re- 
member that France produces two kinds of 
human beings : the luxuriant animal and the 
luxuriant soul — men who will deny the being 
of a God and live for only the object of 
transient sense ; and men who will place be- 
fore us a religion full of fervour and colour- 
284 



Victor Hugo 

ing, a religion as rich as the many-tinted 
window of a cathedral, when seen while the 
highest music is sounding a vesper for the 
heart, French religion, when it has come 
to us through some of its noblest minds, 
has come in a most impressive form, having 
in it much of that delicacy and ornament 
which distinguishes the French mind from 
the mind that speaks and argues under more 
northern skies. Chateaubriand, although a 
Romanist, was so modernized by the re- 
flex influence of the Rationalists, that his 
"Genius of Christianity" came to the 
world more like a lofty poem than like a 
treatise from a theologian. His wide read- 
ing, his travels in all lands, his dreamings in 
the forests of America, when General Wash- 
ington became his friend, his poetic medita- 
tions in the land of Christ and the apostles, 
his poems — " Atala " and " Rene " — his nov- 
els, betrayed and created an eloquence which 
made Christianity repose upon the day of un- 
belief like the rainbow upon black clouds. 
The general truths of religion came from his 
hand as beautiful and pure as the marbles 
from the sculptor's studio. The civilized 
world had never before seen the height and 
depth of the sentiment of God, the Son of 

o - - 



The Message of David Swing 

God, and immortal life. lie had been a 
rationalist, and almost a free-thinker, but he 
returned to the established Romanism as 
being the best hope of humanity. 

In looking at these forerunners of Hugo, 
we must not omit the name of Lamennais. 
He, too, was one of the eloquent souls for 
which French religion has been very remark- 
able. Lamennais remained in the mother 
church until he had reached his forty-sixth 
year. But in the later of those years, he had 
with so much power advocated liberty of re- 
ligion, freedom of speech, that when he an- 
nounced his withdrawal from Rome he had 
not far to go. The volume he published at 
the time went through a hundred editions 
before its grand style and language sank into 
silence. It was the song of the new world. 

These names will serve to remind us that 
France is not atheistic ; but she has come to 
that condition of education and liberty which 
makes her greatest minds prefer to stand 
outside of the Church and perhaps aloof from 
the public religion. The Roman Church in 
its refusal to learn the truth has become a 
sanctuary whose doors open outward, that 
those in may escape. It reverses in France 
the gospel imagery of a feast to which the 
286 



Victor Hugo 

multitude were urged to come in ; here this 
feast is seen and known to be over, a-nd the 
honourable guests are compelled to retire. 
Many who remain within, priest and people, 
are in full sympathy with the rationalism 
and republicanism on the outside. When 
Lamennais advocated liberty and equality 
the lower clergy were on his side ; the higher 
ecclesiastics were the ones to oppose his 
liberal views. Even now when riots and 
barricades are prevalent in Paris, the men 
of no religion are found side by side with 
those who are nominal followers of Christ, 
all these meeting on the common ground of 
hunger, nakedness, and injustice. 

Victor Hugo comes up before us with the 
same ardent belief in God Avhich has marked 
many of the greatest men of France. He is 
seen standing for a great transition period in 
which old Romanism and old Calvinism are 
dying, and something better is being elabo- 
rated in the mind and heart of the new epoch. 
Although his mind was set to romance and 
poetry like that of Lamartine, he possessed 
more of unbridled power, and what he ut- 
tered regarding God added to the sweetness 
of the poetic the roll of thunder. His short 
and sharp sentences fell not like an argument 
287 



The Message of David Swing 

but like the sentence of a final judgment. 
When the Deity was introduced in novel or 
drama or speech no apologies were made for 
His entrance. He came in like a king. JSTo 
modern writer made so little use of miti- 
gating terms. The terms " peradventure," 
" perhaps," " presume," " suppose " were sel- 
dom asked to perform any service. Water- 
loo was lost " because of God " ; Napoleon 
" vexed God " ; " the shadow of an enormous 
right hand rested upon Waterloo " ; " God 
passed over it." In the last words of Jean 
Yaljean this Supreme Ruler enters the scene 
beautifully, but with no modifying particles 
of doubt or contingency. " Such are the dis- 
tributions of God. He is on high. He sees 
us all, and knows what He is doing among 
the great stars." 

That individuality which made this great 
man seem an egotist clothed him with power 
when amid the world-wide themes of action 
and opinion. He seldom came to a contem- 
plation of himself, and hence his egotism 
consumes but few sentences in his mass of 
written thought. He should be forgiven, 
because the mental quality which was some- 
times egotistic was in most hours the move- 
ment of a powerful will and an open heart 
288 



Victor Hugo 

incapable of concealment. He made him- 
self visible only at rare intervals, compared 
with his grand public presentation of hu- 
manity and the fact and presence of God. 
In one of his novels the world's miserable 
stand forth in such visible and lovable and 
beseeching attitude that the living and ad- 
vancing race will not soon lose sight again 
of the unhappy. He was a painter greater 
than those who have covered canvas with 
their conceptions, for while Parrhasius could 
not paint a groan, the art of Victor Hugo 
was fully equal to that task. His language 
caught up the troubles of the multitude and 
made this groan sound in the two hemi- 
spheres — a pathetic and solemn tone struck 
from a loud-sounding harp. He also could 
paint the gladness of the soul, but no mu- 
sician, no sculptor, no architect, no painter, 
could say of human happiness what Hugo 
said : " Our joys are shaded. The perfect 
smile belongs to God alone." 

In this transition period, while pulpit and 
church were seeking better definitions of 
their old terms, and asking Whence came 
man — from a Creator, or from inanimate 
causes, and by what path ? Hugo was busy 
with the actual world applying the ideas of 
2S9 



The Message of David Swing 

Jesus on behalf of the orphans and widows — 
" those formidable pleaders " — made by the 
armed Napoleons, on behalf of black slave 
and white, the oppressed of the whole world. 
What a poet was he compared with the Greek 
Anacreon ! For this sensual Pagan said, 
his forehead crowned with leaves and his 
harp in his hand, " Farewell all truth, phi- 
losophy, and heroes ; I shall sing only of 
love." But the modern poet said : " I will 
forget love, family, childhood, song, and 
leisure that I may sing for the welfare of 
the oppressed." Beyond doubt his fifty 
years of sympathetic opinion and eloquent 
speech have entered into the better laws and 
kinder philanthropy of the century. 

"We are thankful for the more symmetrical 
men of the times, for the calmer poets, the 
more careful philosophers, the men of pro- 
found learning and of childlike modesty, 
thankful for those minds which lead us in- 
side the sanctuary and whose prayers and 
hymns keep up the never dying flame upon 
the altar, thankful for the great good done 
by the Calvinists and the Romanists, and to 
all those flowing tides of gratitude we may 
add a feeling of gladness that such a man as 
this Yictor came such as he was and passed 
290 



Victor Hugo 

along through our century by the pathway 
now marked by his footsteps. His intense 
manner aroused a sleeping myriad. His 
funeral in France attended in some manner 
by a million persons tells us how his writings 
and presence have affected that vast multi- 
tude that knows the sorrow of poverty, the 
cruelty of despotism, and the sweet of lib- 
erty and equality. In that great moment 
the Pantheon was secularized that so great a 
friend of mankind might rest in a great 
tomb. Instead of being secularized it was 
rather made more religious by receiving 
within its walls that forehead that was fur- 
rowed by frowns against wrong, those lips 
that had long been eloquent over the being 
of God. 

In his prophecy and sublime prose-poem 
upon God, Ezekiel many times addresses the 
son of man to urge him to mark and adore 
that Divine Providence from whom came 
the mystery of life. " Son of man " is a 
phrase that stands for the average power and 
nobleness of human nature. It points out 
man in his youth, in his romance, reverence, 
love, ambition, vivacity, logic, and hope. 
Infancy with its weakness has passed away, 
age with its decline has not come. Christ 
291 



The Message of David Swing 

took this title as a part of His honour, but 
He was also the son of God. Looking into 
our period we can detect here and there the 
"sons of men." Victor Hugo was one of 
these. He was the son of our century — a 
full expression of the science, reason, art, 
benevolence, and broad religion that have 
taken deep root in its rich soil ; he was the 
full expression of the millions who are weep- 
ing their way along as they journey from 
poverty's cradle to poverty's grave ; he was 
the son of the rationalism of Europe which 
has filled the era with great minds able to 
live great lives ; he was the son of America 
in his devotion to a universal liberty and 
equality, a man reared upon the truths which 
made all those statesmen who are dear to 
hearts this side the sea; he was a son of 
France in his passionate imagery, fancy, and 
in his matchless language ; a son of religion, 
too, for going out of the doors of the old 
Church he did it to enter at once the holier 
Temple of the Almighty. As some one has 
said, "He turned his back to the Church 
that he might turn his face to God." 

"With history full of such names, with the 
air full of gratitude for such lives and full 
of lamentation for such graves, with these 
292 



Victor Hugo 

pictures before them of colossal minds ex- 
tracting happiness and power from a divine 
faith, the 3'^oung men of our day should feel 
that atheism possesses no intellectual charm ; 
that religion in its essence is a height to 
which even genius may be glad to climb. 

The Atheists recently attempted to hold a 
general meeting. It was to be in Rome, that 
it might seem more like a triumph of a proud 
reason over a superstitious faith. But it 
failed. Not a single delegate from all Eng- 
land was present — few from any point. 
There is not that in atheism that can inspire 
the heart. Men have made long pilgrimages, 
have journeyed in hunger and storm, but 
this travel has never been towards an empty 
life and the death of a brute, but always 
towards a God or the tomb of Him who 
said, " I am the resurrection and the life." 
God is the life of the heart. 

May our century rear out of its measure- 
less resources more great natures like that of 
Victor Hugo ; men who will make humanity 
sound forth in grand music, and who, with 
an inspired mantle, will smite the stream of 
atheism until its waters shall part and open 
up for our millions of youth an easy pathway 
between their souls and God ! 
293 



Index 



Adam's sin, 129 
Adamses, the, 95 
Addison, Joseph, 65 
/Esop, 45 
Anacreon, 290 
Anarchistic Americans, 192 
Antonius, Marcus, 215, 228, 

230, 240 
Apelles, 93 
Archbishops of Canterbury 

and Westminster, 186 
Arethusa, 119 
Aristotle, 251 
Arnold, Benedict, 39, 67 
Aspasia, 240 
Athens, 93, 164 
Atticus, Crassus, 208, 215 
Augasan stables, 232 
Augustine, 267 
Aurelius, Marcus, 45 

Babylon, 263 

Bacon, Lord, quoted, 1 1 

Bancroft, George, 27 

Barrows, John H., 21 

Beatrice, a poetical memory 
to Dante, 236; meets 
Dante, 241 ; why se- 
lected, 246-247 ; romantic 
ideal of highest things, 
252 

Beauty in life and teaching, 
16-17 

Beecher, Henry Ward, 12, 
13, 15, Chapter VI, 124- 



1 38 ; greatest years of, 
1845-1865 ; made an 
American politics and an 
American religion, 1 27 ; 
hated scholastic theology, 
130; eloquence of, made 
history, 131 ; corruptions 
of- slavery, 132 ; great 
work of, 134-137; gone 
with other champions of 
freedom, 138 

Beecher, Lyman, 126-129 

Beethoven, 265 

Bellus homo, 216 

Boethius, 251 

British army in Philadel- 
phia, 58 

Broad church, 156 

Bronte Sisters, 264 

Brooks, Phillips, lo, 13, 
Chapter VIL 139-158; 
title Bishop lost in, 139; 
" great commoner " of re- 
ligion, 141 ; great men of 
Episcopacy, 143 ; longed 
for Christian unity and 
equality, 150-152; elo- 
quence of, 1 5 2- 1 54; les- 
sons for all churchmen in, 
155 ; reason will trans- 
form all churches, 157- 
158 

Browning, Elizabeth B., 239 

Browning, Robert, 239 

Bruce, Heart of the, 28 



294 



Index 



Brutus, Decimus, 215 
Brutus, Marcus, 210, 215, 

227 
Buchanan, James, 60 
Bunyan, John, 90 
Burke, Edmund, 65, 140 
Burr, Aaron, 67 

Cv^sAR, Augustus, 250 
Csesar, Julius, 210, 212, 214, 

220 ; death of, 225-227 ; 
referred to, 260 

Csesar, Octavius, 228 

Carlyle, Thomas, 242 

Casca, 215, 227 

Castelar, 49 

Cato, 210, 215 

Cavour, 49 

Channing, Wm. E., lOI, 103 

Charles I, 85 

Chase, Salmon P., 107 

Chateaubriand, 285 

Cheever, Dr. George, 132 

Choate, Rufus, 27 

Christ and Augustus, 250 

Christian ideas — peace, lib- 
erty, and equality — illus- 
trated by Sumner, 96 

Cicero, Marcus Tullius, 94, 
99, 119, 121 ; slave and 
librarian of, 200 ; let- 
ters from, 201, 202 ; de- 
scription of, 203-204 ; 
villas of, 204-209 ; as 
scholar, 209 ; home fun 
of, 210-212 ; as orator, 
213; moderate life of, 

221 ; grief of at Tullia's 
death, 224 ; flight and 
death of, 228-230 ; re- 
ferred to, 251, 267 

Cicero, Marcus (son of or- 
ator), 218 



Cicero, Quintus, 215 
Cimber, Tullius, 226 
Clay, Henry, 20, 36, 69, 76, 

95. 131 

Cleopatra, 240 
Cleveland, Grover, 176, 178 
Cole, J. R., 173 
Coleridge, S. T., 131 
Confucius, 93 
Cornelia, 216 
Cornvvailis' surrender, 54 
Cotta, Dame Ursula, 268 
Cousin, Victor, 2S3 
Cromwell, Oliver, 114 
Cross, Sir Robert, i£6 
Curtis, George Wm., 14 

Dante, ir, 23, 38. 04, 108, 

114. 151 

Dante, Chapter XI, 233- 
259 ; myths as illustra- 
tions, 232-235 ; Beatrice 
a poetical memory to, 236- 
237 ; writes Inferno in 
Latin, love-poem Para- 
dise in Italian, 238 ; 
woman in classic and me- 
dieval times, 239-241 ; 
Beatrice met, 241 ; ban- 
ishment of Dante, 242 ; 
Paradiso history of a pe- 
riod, 243-244 ; fiction, 
245 ; why Beatrice ? 246- 
247 ; Europe in Thirteenth 
Century, 248; Guelphs 
and Ghibellines, 249 ; in- 
fluence of Paradiso — he- 
roic author, high art, 252- 
253 ; examples of beauty, 
254-257 ; value of the 
poem, 258-260 

Danton, 282 

Dartmouth College, 132 



295 



Index 



Darwinians, theory of, 35 
David and yEneas, 250 
Decoration Day, Chapter 
VIII, 159-175; reasons 
for, 159-160 ; honourable 
wars of United States, 
161 ; sorrows of the war, 
161-163; peace commis- 
sion and Lincoln, 163- 
164 ; slavery and war, 
165 ; flowers for triumph 
of right, 166-167 » injus- 
tice to Negro, 169-171 ; 
national harmony, 172- 

175 
De Alonarchia, modernness 

of, 249 
Demosthenes, 115, 119 
De Soto, 63 

De Stael, Madame, 262, 283 
De Tocqueville, 119 
Dido and Lavniia, 246 
Douglas, Stephen A., 60 
Douglass, Frederick, 1 10 
Duty of the Pulpit to Social 
Unrest, Chapter IX, 176- 
196; labour and capital 
at odds, 176; the strike, 
178; pulpit near the peo- 
ple, 180; labour unions, 
180-187 ; American an- 
archists, 192 ; theological 
preaching worthless, 193- 
194 ; pulpit must teach 
for to-day's needs, 195- 
196 

East India Company, 69 
Egeria, 241 
Eloquence, 153-154 
Emerson, R. \V., 15, 115 
Epictetus, 44 
Esther, Queen, 262 



Everett, Edward, 115 
Ezekiel, 291 

Faust, 234 

February, 37 

Fenelon, 145 

Florence, 1 1 

Formian villa, the, 202 

France, 47 ; religion of, 

278-284 
Franklin, Benjamin, 39, 

162, 185, 264, 2S0 
Furman, Rev. Dr., 134 

Garfield, James A., 20, 
Chapter III, 72-87; 
death and character of, 
74-75 ; humble start, 76- 
77 ; greatness of, 78 ; uni- 
versally mourned, 80-81 ; 
religion of, 82-83 ; Amer- 
ican history rich in men, 
84-85 ; Lincoln and, 86 ; 
lesson of mortality, 87 

Garrison, \Vm. L., 12, 60, 
107 

Gladstone, Wm. E., 22, 27 

Goethe, 234 

Grant, Ulysses S., 136 

Greece, 119 

Greeley, Horace, 107 

Hallam, Henry, 239 

Hamilton, Alexander, 65 

Hamilton, Sir Wm., 238 

Harcourt, Sir Wm., 186 

Harpies, 234 

Hayes, Rutherford B., 169 

Henry, Patrick, 69 

Hercules, 232 

Herrennius, 230 

High and Low church, 146 

Hillis, Newell Dwight : 



296 



Index 



Swing Memorial Address, 
9-32 ; Swing as pastor, 
9 ; his death, lO ; place 
in Chicago, 1 1 ; a poetic 
preacher, 13, 14; for- 
bears, 15; a minister of 
culture, 17 ; worth of 
beauty and imagination, 
18-21 ; Swing's optimism, 
21-24 j genius of good 
sense in religion, 25-26; 
Chicago's debt to, 27-28 ; 
great qualities of, 29 

Homer, 94, 114, 233, 246 

Hortensius, 210, 212, 215 

Howard, John, 12 

Hugo, Victor, Chapter XHI, 
278-293; religion, ra- 
tionalism, and atheism in 
France, 278-2S4; ration- 
alism parent of Hugo, 
282 ; romance and re- 
ligion of, 287 ; powerful 
use of Christ's ideas by, 
290 ; intensity of, aroused 
millions, 291 ; character- 
ization of, 292 ; a foe to 
atheism, 293 

Hydra, 232 

Inferno of Dante, 238 
Irving, Washington, 131 
Ithuriel, 234 

Jean Valjean, 288 
Jefferson, Thomas, 95 
Jerusalem, 72 
Jesus Christ, 23, 26, 33, 34, 

. 64, 70, 73 
Jim Crow car, I33 
Johnson, Dr. Samuel, 65 
Judaea, 37, 52 
Justinian, 94 



Kerberus, 233 

King Lear, 23 

King, Thomas Starr, III 

Klopstock, 234 

L^LIA girls, the, 216 

Lafayette, 65 

Lamartine, 131, 284 

Lamennais, 286 

Lepidus, 228 

Lincoln, Abraham, 12, 23, 
33-70. 84, 86, 95, 105, 
114, 126, 164, 169, 264 

Locke, John, 238 

London Bank, 69 

Longfellow, H. W., 115, 131 

Lord's Prayer in Dante, 152 

Lot's wife, 233 

Lovejoy, Elijah P., 132 

Louis XIV, 152 

Luther, Martin, 1 14, Chap- 
ter XII, 260-277 J o"'' 
modern glories inherited, 
260-263 ; humble birth 
and youth of Luther, 264- 
267 ; street singing, 268 ; 
studies, 270-271 ; quali- 
ties, 272 ; leaving law, 
entered church, 274 ; in 
convent no Bible, but 
Latin poets, 275-276 ; 
piety of, 276 ; elements 
of leadership, 277 

Mabie, H. W., quoted, 234 
Macaulay, T. B., 14, 27, 131 
Mann, Horace, in 
Manning, Cardinal, 186 
Marat, 85 
Mark Antony, see Antonius, 

Marcus 
Marquette, 238 
Mars and the Muses, 49 



297 



Index 



Mary, Queen of Scots, 85 
Marys and Magdalens, 240- 

241 
Matilda, 235 
Mathew, Father, 133 
Meade, Bishop, 134 
Medici, the, 126 
Mexican War, 16 1 
Mexico, 279 

Michael Angelo, 93, 99, 126 
Mill, John Stuart, 99, 1S5, 

239, 240 
Miltiades, 28 
Milton, 23, 38, 114, 233, 

234 
Minerva, 240 
Minnesingers, the, 237 
Mississippi, the, 63 
Missouri Compromise, 104 
Mozart, 94, 265 

Napoleon, 95, 165, 283 

Nazareth, 72 

Nero, 39 

New England, 108 

New Mexico, 264 

Newman, Cardinal, 49 

New Testament and woman, 

240-241 
Newton, Sir Isaac, 238 
Nile, the, 16, 52 
Numa Pompilius, 241 

O'CONNELL, 133 
Ovid, 233 
Oxford, 41, 145 

Paine, Thomas, 280 

Palestine, 93 

Parker, Theodore, 107, I ID, 

116, 132 
Parrhasius, 44, 94 
Pascal, Blaise, 99, 194, 282 



Penelope, 246 

Penn, William, 10 1 

Pericles, 240, 245 

Pharaohs, 260 

Phidias, 93 

Phillips, Wendell, 60, Chap- 
ter V, 107-123; opening 
career of, 108-109 ; elo- 
quent anti-slavery men, 
III; would more har- 
mony with government 
have made Phillips more 
efficient, 112; great men 
differ, 113-115; religion 
of, 115-117; need of, 
1 1 8-1 19; cause of man 
still worthy, 120; elo- 
quence, 121 ; memory of, 
is Freedom, 123 ; referred 
to, 132, 172 

Pitt, William, 24, 115, 139, 
140 

Plato, 38, 78, 114 

Poetry, worth of, 270-272 

Polk, James K., i6l 

Polydorus, 234 

Pompey, 215 

Pomponia, 215 

Publius, 215 

Punch on Lincoln. 61 

Puseyism, 144 

Pythagoras, 251 

Queen Elizabeth, 40 
Queen Victoria, 81 

Rachel, 235 

Railroad labourers' losses by 

strikes, 184-185 
Raleigh, Sir Walter, 40 
Raphael, 23 

Redmond, Charles L., 133 
Richardson, the architect, 10 



298 



Index 



Ritualism, I42-I50» ^5^ 
Robespierre, 282 
Roland, Madame, 262 
Roman empire, 37 
Romanism, 142, 157 
Roman Home, A, Chapter 
X, 199-231 ; Tiro and 
Ximenes, 199 ; Cicero's 
librarian, 200 ; Cicero 
and family, 202-204 ; 
villas of Cicero, 204-209 ; 
humours and friends, 210- 
216; social songs, 217 ; 
Roman feast, 220; do- 
mestic troubles, 222-224; 
tragedies, 225-230 
Rome, 93 
Royer-CoUard, 284 
Rufus, 210 
Ruskin, John, 13I 
Russia, 165 

St. John, 39. 49 

St. Paul, 39. 95 

St. Peter's in Rome, 24, 94, 

137 . „ 

Salvation Army, 140 

Satan, 234 
Savonarola, 114. 264 
Seer-like visions, 19 
Seneca, 93 
Shakespeare, 39, 264 
Smith, Gerritt, 107 
Socrates, 44, 114. 250 
Solomon, 251; temple of, 

148 „ 

Spurgeon, Charles H., 13, 

27 
Star-Spangled Banner, 69 

Statins, 235 
Sterne, Laurence, 143- 
Steuben, Baron, 58 
Stilling, philosopher, 265 



Stone River battle, 1 59 
Sumner, Charles, Chapter 
IV, 88-106 ; greatness of 
national ideal, 88-94 ; 
career of Sumner essen- 
tially Christian, 96 ; ora- 
tion of, against war, 97 ; 
austere scholarly coolness 
of, 98-99 ; peace, justice, 
liberty, the aims of, loi- 
104 ; hopefulness of, help 
to Lincoln, 105 ; spirit of 
hope novir needed, 106 ; 
Sumner referred to, 107, 
110, 132 
Swift, Jonathan, 143 
Swing, David, see N. U. 
Hillis 

Tennyson, Alfred, 23 
Terentia, wife of Cicero, 
203-204 ; divorce of, 223 
Texas, 161 
Thucydides, 94 
Tiro, Marcus TuUius, letter 

from, 199-231 
Trebatius, 210, 2il 
TuUia, daughter of Cicero, 
203-204, 218 ; death of. 
224 
Tusculum villa, the, 204- 

209 

Valley Forge, 57 

Verres, 211 

Virgil, 39.94. ii4. 195.232. 

246 
Voltaire, 282, 284 

Wages advanced by reason, 

not violence, 187 
Washington and Lincoln, 1, 

Chapter I, 33-53! sky- 



Index 



watchers for signs of the 
times, 33-36 ; the two of- 
fer lesson, Washington of 
prosperity, Lincoln of ad- 
versity, 39-44 ; both fol- 
lowed by triumphant 
peace, 46 ; religion of, not 
sectarian but rational and 
filial, 47-49 ; new gener- 
ation, new crisis — what 
will riches and poverty do 
with them ? 50-53 
Washington and Lincoln, 
II, Chapter II, 54-71 ; 
Americans celebrate birth- 
days, ancients, death- 
days, 54-55; Washington 
and Lincoln to us like 
saints to Christianity, 56 ; 
trusted by their followers, 
58-59 ; formed before be- 
ing needed, 60 ; Punch 
confesses Lincoln's great- 



ness, 61 ; retrospect, 62- 
64 ; warmth of heart in 
both, 65-67 ; nation not 
corporation but family, 
68-70 

Washington, George, 65,94, 
114, 120, 285 

Washington, Martha, 65 

Washington, I^awrence, 41 

Waterloo, 88, 288 

Webster, Daniel, 36, 69, 76, 
95, 114, 126, 131, 139 

Wesley, John, 144 

Whittier, John G., loi 

Wilberforce, 131 

Wilson, Henry, 107 

Winkelmann, 131 

Xavier, Francis, 238 

Zenobia, 262 
Zulus, 264 



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